In the world today almost everything that we are offered in the form of services, uses cloud computing in one form or another. Whether you are doing online banking transactions, online shopping, playing games, saving your data or any other technical activity you can think of, you must be using different type of Cloud Computing Services.
What cloud computing does?
After the revolution called Information Technology and Internet, Cloud Computing is a game changer the way we did business. It has emerged as a computing technology working on the Internet as backbone and high-end central remote servers as the nervous system. These robust and high powered servers are also the resources offered through cloud computing while they maintain data and applications.
Cloud computing is a broader technology still in infancy as the industry is struggling to lay down a crisp definition and exact range of services. Cloud computing broadly describes off-premise, on-demand computing where the end-user is provided services related to infrastructure, platforms and applications by the cloud services providers over the Internet. The biggest advantage as seen by the users is its on-demand services since they pay only for what they use. The customers can manage their expenditure in a better way by adjusting resources according to their long term or short term targets.
Cloud computing technology needs huge pools of resources connected through private or public networks. It is a revolutionary design that simplifies infrastructure setting up. It offers dynamically scalable infrastructure for countless cloud based applications and storage needs. It is up to the businesses that what they want to deploy for their business applications. They can choose from Public, Private, Hybrid clouds or the latest option a Community Cloud.
Types of Cloud Computing Services – Granularity Level of Services
IaaS ( infrastructure as a service)
If you look at the level of services then IaaS is the most basic model of cloud computing. What customers get is the core services in the form of physical or virtual computers and other associated resources that may not be affordable by a small or medium level organization. Customers can avail additional resources like virtual-machine disk image library, raw or file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles.
PaaS (platform as a service)
By opting for PaaS model, the customers benefit from varying computing platforms. These platforms range from operating system to databases and everything in between including programming language execution environment and web servers. It gives a major cost cutting in a small firm offering software solutions since they can develop and execute their solutions on a cloud platform. As a developer you don’t have to worry about the costs to be borne for buying software, customizing it to match the underlying hardware and software layers.
Saas (software as a service)
We learnt about Infrastructure and the platforms. The last thing in this discussion in the light of cloud computing services is the software. SaaS business model encourages customers to use software as a service wherein they can access and use the application software and databases through a cloud. A brilliant idea of on-demand software allows the users to select a combo of software components from suite of applications to match their business needs. The benefit is that they don’t have to pay for the components they are never going to use since it is billed on the pay-per-use criteria.
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