Cloud computing is one of the most notorious technology that revolutionised the whole industry. This technology alone changed the game and turned the wheel in the most effective way possible until now. From Amazon to Microsoft and all other giants in the industry to mid-level enterprise, business, been shifting towards the cloud since because they reap the benefit of going cloud right off it from the beginning. Assuming you already know what cloud computing is, let’s turn to the reason why you and I to large corporation been moving towards the cloud.
Virtualisation
Before Cloud was established and took over the industry, there had been virtualisation, which was the game changer, and in fact, virtualisation is the reason why cloud was born in the first place. In the heart of the cloud, lies the virtualisation. We won’t get into the grainy details of what virtualisation is but let’s scratch the surface. Virtualisation is the process of using multiple operating system inside one machine without having to purchase separate machines. This is not just only cost effective but comes in other bunch of powerful benefits. This concept goes even further with the bare-metal and hypervisor etc.
Which eventually gave birth to the cloud. Without the virtualisation, cloud could not exist.
Shared Resources
A physical hardware is where virtualisation take place. So the hardware is available to some portion or fully with its resources to a virtual machine. This hardware can be combined and then shared. These shared resources can come in as internal or external or both which can be applied to one or more virtual machines. Virtualisation technology exposes this much of flexibility.
Rapid Elasticity
To get a full picture of this point, let’s see the picture in the first place. Imagine you have started a new Web Application. If you pick up an IaaS provider like Amazon, you can easily start a single server and get your web app up and running and open it up to the world. Still, what if your application is a hit and gets tremendous amount of traffic. This is where the cloud computing come in handy. You can utilize features provided by the AWS (Amazon Web Service) which can easily expand the number of servers. Not only that, you can also spread them out geographically with just a click of the button. This is what known as the Rapid Elasticity.
On-Demand
Now what if your web application get wild swings in demand. How are you going to deal with that? A local organizer wants to sell gig tickets online. But when there is a band coming in to perform, the bandwidth demand for them is low to none. Now when the gig is announced and local hot shot bands are going to perform, website will be flooded with Ticker requests. With the cloud computing in action, you can easily set-up your application in such that you can add or reduce the capacity on demand. With this set, your application adapts and adjust itself to the current demands coming in.
Measured and metered service
One of the “Oh boy!” moment of public cloud is you have to write that check to whoever is managing the work for you and guess what? Boy, they surely know 99 ways to creative charging! There are some cases where you will be charged based on traffic that goes out and comes in to and from your web application. Other times, you just simply pay for the each or single server running in their server.
However the costs are calculated, this is known as measured service. This is so due to its distinct way of charging than the traditional hosting with a fixed monthly or yearly fee. Some companies out there may charge you for the amount of resources being used by your web application. For instance, CPU usage. This is known as metered service rate. This entitles to a careful monetization of resources used. You pay for the part of the hardware used rather than a general fee for the whole machine used.