DECODING CLOUD COMPUTING

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Cloud Computing, or Cloud Computing, is the term used to deliver technology resources on demand. They are made through the Internet with a definition of payment price according to what is used.

What is Cloud?

Let's think about a computer: it basically consists of a processor to process data, a hard disk HD or SSD to record information and ram memory to temporarily store files. The first problem that people usually have is the lack of space for storing files and programs. The solution was: buy an external HD. We even used an external HD to back up the files, thinking about failure cases.

Managing files on external HD's started to become something complicated... Who hasn't lost a folder of photos of something memorable?

This is how OneDrive, a Microsoft cloud storage service, was born. You can access it from anywhere at any time. Soon after, Apple also started offering this service with the arrival of iCloud, which today is one of the most used. This means that you are storing data in a cloud, that is, your data on someone else's servers.

You might be asking yourself "is storing photos and files in the cloud safe?" . Yes, leading Cloud Computing providers have security services to protect critical information from theft, data leakage and deletion.

How is Cloud Computing useful?

In the digital world, any business that operates needs massive amounts of operational resources to run its applications and store its data.

Traditionally, these companies hosted their infrastructure on servers/data centers on their premises. This implied certain disadvantages, such as high operational cost, especially when you need to host in different locations (thinking about disaster/recovery), maintenance and security.

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Cloud Computing is there to afford large investments, agility and ease of infrastructure maintenance.

Benefits

    Scalability and Elasticity

Cloud Computing allows scalability for companies to meet the expected demands for the coming months/years, without large investments in infrastructure, on the other hand, elasticity allows companies to drastically reduce the computing capacity of the contracted services based on current demand, that is, , you provision the resource you need, when you need it.

    Reduced Costs

Cloud infrastructure provisioning is something that needs to be analyzed, planned and created. We cannot think of the Cloud as a new datacenter, it is necessary to change the provisioning strategy, to think of micro services for each type of application. Following this strategy, companies will have reduced infrastructure costs.

    High Availability

The translation of high availability is "eliminate all points of failure and create redundancy in processes and equipment". The services offered in Cloud Computing allow us to create redundancy in the different layers of operation. In a single "click" you can have the same Database replicated in different places.

    Disaster Recovery

The services offered at Cloud Computing include backup managed by them in case of disaster recovery , it is only up to us to decide the best restoration strategy.

Cloud Offers

    IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a service operates on a traditional cloud architecture. Service providers host the infrastructure as well as servers (Servers), storage units (Storage), network hardware (Networking) and virtualization or hypervisor layer (Virtualization). IaaS stands for “the virtual delivery of computing resources in the form of hardware, network and storage services. It may also include the delivery of operating systems and virtualization technology to manage resources. Rather than buying and installing the resources they need in their own data center, companies lease those resources as needed.”

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    PaaS - Platform as a Service

PaaS is “ a category of cloud services that provide a platform that allows customers to develop, run and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an application”. That is, the platform as a service hosts both Hardware and Software.

    SaaS - Software as a Service

In the SaaS or Software as a Service model, the Cloud Computing provider is responsible for the entire structure necessary to provide the service. The company/customer is only concerned with using the software via the internet, paying a price for what they use, known as an 'on demand' service. The big SaaS service providers are AWS , Azure and Google Cloud .

Conclusion

Cloud is already part of our day-to-day, all our information is stored on someone else's servers. For companies, provisioning their infrastructure on Cloud Computing means being able to open an office anywhere. This provides flexibility for employees to work from wherever they are! If you are interested and want to delve deeper, check out our Database course here at Let's Code.