Wednesday, February 2, 2011

What is Cloud Computing?

Everyone is talking about cloud computing these days. Let the person be IT or non-IT everyone is using this phrase, some of them know what it means some of them do not know. Let me explain to those who do not know.

Let us start with the word Cloud. Cloud has no shape no size, you do not know what exactly lies behind the cloud you are looking at, this is called as Abstraction in IT language. 

What was the need of cloud computing?
Human being started barter system in old day, reason was to exchange the goods you have with the goods others have. Later on people started exchanging  for food, shelter, clothing. This is also called as resource sharing. because i have something in excess i can share it with someone and get something in return. This was origin of could computing concept.

These days many companies have servers racks. which are not used at their full capacity. Many times servers are idle. To make use of this idle time and to get some ROI, companies decided to rent out their computing power for others for some limited time.

There are many companies in non-IT domain who want to use IT services but do not want to invest heavily on the IT infrastructure and maintenance of that infrastructure. So.. these companies started using infrastructure of above mentioned companies for some fees.

Obviously there are more companies in the world who want to use these services than the companies who have already invested in infrastructure. So some more companies started creating infrastructure to provide only cloud computing as service.

This sharing idea can be also implemented as subscription. Thus there are 3 variations of this cloud computing idea.
1. SaaS (Software as a Service)
2. PaaS (Platform as a Service)
3. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Will write more in next blog..