What is Cloud Computing?

In this blog post I’m presenting some basics about Cloud Computing. According to wiki Cloud Computing is “Internet Based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid”. In simple terms Cloud Computing is the process of taking the services and tasks performed by the computers and bringing them to the web.

When considering the basic elements of Cloud Computing, it consists of

• SAAS –Software as a Service
• PAAS –Platform as a Service
• IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service

 SAAS

The concept behind SAAS is renting software from a service provider rather than buying it by ourselves. This is the most popular type of cloud computing. The software is hosted on centralized network server which available over the internet. Google docs, Yahoo mail, CRM applications are instances of SAAS.

Some benefits of SAAS can be listed as below.

• This saves money since we don’t need to buy servers or other software.
•  SAAS applications are available from any computer or any device, anytime and anywhere.
• User need not to worry about the installation or upgrades.
• Flexibility and Scalability.

PAAS

PAAS provides a development platform for developers. The end user writes own code and the PAAS provider uploads that code and presents it on the web. Basically PAAS provides services to develop, test, deploy, host and maintain applications and also it provides some support for the creation of applications as well. The PAAS provider manages upgrades and system maintenance.

There are four types of PAAS solutions namely social application platforms, raw compute platforms, web application platforms and business application platforms. Facebook is a type of social application platforms where third parties can write new applications that are made available to the end users. CRM solutions are examples for business application platforms. When consider raw compute platforms the best example is Amazon’s infrastructure where the developers can upload and execute their applications. Google provides APIs to developers to build web applications and they can be categorized as web application platforms.

Some benefits of PAAS can be listed as below

• Reduce the complexity and cost.
• Provides hosting capabilities and the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building web applications.
• Provides services such as web service integration, database integration, security, scalability, application versioning etc.

IAAS

This is the delivery of computer infrastructure as a fully outsourced service. Google, IBM, Amazon.com are some of the companies which provide infrastructure services. Managing hosting and development environments are the basic services of IAAS.  The user can buy the infrastructure at any particular time according to the requirement instead of buying the infrastructure that might not be used for some time. Basically the user pays only for what they are using this is also known as “Pay as you go” model.   For a small business one of the most difficult things is to keep capital expenditure under control. By moving the infrastructure to the cloud, we can have the ability to scale as if we owned our own hardware and data center. IAAS is also referred as HAAS (Hardware as a Service)  

Some benefits of IAAS can be listed as below.

• Dynamic scaling.
• Usage based pricing.
• Access to superior IT resources.
• Reduce cost.
• Maximum flexibility.

Basically SAAS offers a complete application as a service and PAAS offers the ability to develop an application where IAAS doesn’t care about the application at all. If we have already written the code or have the software package which we want to install and run in the cloud then we go for IAAS. When we have no software or want to build something from scratch to solve a problem where there are no packages or they are too expensive then we go for PAAS.  The three basic elements of cloud computing have a great effect on the IT operations.