Cloud Computing: A beginners Guide

Cloud computing is one of the many services offered through cloud to store your photos, watch videos, play games, send email, perform calculations and a lot other daily tasks which you often do on your device. Like an Arcade game store, you can rent out some available computer over cloud with your credit card and pay as you go for the time spent and resources used.

Instead of single device to perform a task, you can now make use of entire army of computers readily available to serve your command. With this sheer power of compute resources avaialable in-hand you can simply issue a command over voice to get job done. For example,in a date-arranging service one software agent finds the good flower store near by and orders flowers and goes to the ticket shop and gets the tickets for the show under your name and then book a restaurant to match your appetite and everything is communicated to both parties.

Over the years as cloud computing has seen massive growth, more cloud providers are offering their services to rent out their computes for our uses. To name a few,

• Amazon with AWS has a market share of 60%
• Microsoft(Azure) with 31% market share
• Google(GCP) with 9%

From an individual user to small startups to big corporations and governments, cloud has something to offer for their use cases. Here are few examples

Listen to music with a subscription service anytime, anywhere on any device. To stream live sports by increasing and reducing the compute capacity on-demand based on number of viewers Cut down the operational expense by renting the computers on need instead of purchasing and keeping it in-house Use intelligent models to help engage customers and provide valuable insights from the data captured.

Most cloud computing services fall into four broad categories

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform as a service (IaaS) Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases needed for development.

Serverless computing Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.

Software as a service (SaaS) Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet or PC.