Cloud computing is the technology that defined the new horizon of computing. This technology revolutionized the whole industry. Cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft Azure etc. All of them use server-side virtualisation. Virtualisation goes beyond the scope of this article but to put it in a nutshell, virtualisation is running multiple operating system in one machine using hypervisor.
Advent of the cloud service technology
It was around 2005 or 2006 when companies started offering different kind of hosting services. Especially, Amazon. From there cloud services took over the industry and becoming predominant. Why not since this, significantly reduce the overall cost of the physical hardware and their maintenance. We are all so familiar Google drive and DropBox which is also maintained in cloud. But the services like AWS, Azure etc. provides different kind of services than DropBox and google drive.
Service Layer Cake
If anybody starting out a career as a cloud developer, they need to grab a piece of this cake, which contains the layer involved in cloud, and digest them.
It is quite difficult to tell the difference between the cloud, servers and network that comprise the Internet as a whole. The servers and the network of the cloud is used via layers of software, which add value to the whole underlying hardware. This is done by making the overall process quite simple to perform complicated tasks and manage powerful hardware.
As the user, they only use and utilize the top most part of the layer which is the software portion of the cake and it makes sense since they do not care of about the layer beneath them which are of utter importance to other sector of people. This software is web applications like Google Drive, DropBox, Gmail, Facebook etc. The layers beneath them are to support such application on the top of the layers.
Generally, this cake consists of three layers. These are known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software As A Service (SaaS). We are going to look at all of these services empowered by the cloud technology in the following articles on the topic.