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Enterprises are now moving towards the cloud! There has no better way of moving towards cloud than now! With most companies trying to save their cost of creating an infrastructure, cloud is now their helping hand!
With more companies across the world moving towards cloud, the demand for people working in cloud has increased exponentially! So, then what exactly is cloud computing and why on Earth so many people are moving towards cloud!!

The cloud services actually have the following capabilities –

1. Rapid elasticity
2. On-demand self service
3. Resource Pooling
4. Metered Billing Service
5. Broad network accessibility

Let us now begin with understanding what exactly are the above capabilities.

RAPID ELASTICITY

Rapid elasticity is one of the most beautiful functions of cloud. With this, the cloud service providers provide the consumers with the option of quickly stretching and releasing the capacity of the computing resources as per your needs at any point of time.

ON-DEMAND SELF SERVICE

What can be better than an on demand service! Most cloud service providers provide a self service portal, which is interfaced with automated resource management. Because of this, you can add, release, track or pay your resources. When doing so, the best part is that you do not even require the intervention of any cloud service provider. Because of this service, there is a drastic turn around time.Even more, there is zero probability of provisioning errors due to miscommunication between the consumers and the cloud service providers.

RESOURCE POOLING

The cloud service providers provide a large resource of hardware and software resources. To ensure that the resources are being utilized in the best possible way, the cloud service providers allocate same physical resources across multiple cloud consumers by separating it on logical level. You can allocate resources either –

1. automatically based on their demand, using load balancers
2. manually, based on their requests through self provisioning portals

Since in resource pooling, there are less chances of idle resources, it makes up for the ideal setup. Even more, since there are lot of resources present, the failed component can be replaced by another one from the resource pool.

METERED BILLING

In metered billing, the cloud service providers measure and meter the usage of resources by the consumer. This is possible because of the built in services that tracks the quantity of resources that were used. This model is also known as pay as you go model.

BROAD NETWORK ACCESSIBILITY

This simply means that the cloud service providers allow the consumers to access computing resources through the internet. You can do it round the clock, from any location and using any type of device.

So, if this all about cloud computing, then what are the benefits of cloud computing. Well, following are some of the benefits that cloud computing offers to its users –

1. low initial investment on IT infrastructure as resources are not owned but rented out from cloud service providers.
2. Computing resources can be scaled up or down as per the requirement of the individual
3. The deployment time is less because the resources are provisioned automatically or in a self service manner.
4. With the reduced cost of infrastructure, the enterprises can focus on their business rather than the IT infrastructure.
5. Cloud consumers have to pay only for what they use and can access their work from anywhere as long as they are connected to the internet.

THE MODEL

The cloud service providers provide three services to its consumers –

1. Software as a service
2. Platform as a service
3. Infrastructure as a service

Let us delve deeper into understanding what these are –

Infrastructure as a Service

Depending on the business requirement of the customer, the IAAS providers allocate the hardware or software from their resources and make them available to you over the internet. Even more, you are charged on the basis of the resources allocation or usage. It is the IaaS provider who is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it.

Platform as a Service

The platform that is provided by the cloud providers includes the OS, development tools, programming-language execution, environment, dbms etc. The environment created in PaaS can be used by the developers even on their systems. It helps business to develop and deploy the applications pretty fast

Software as a Service

The SaaS provider hosts the application and data centrally on their resources. So, the Saas provider is not only responsible for providing and managing the software but even the infrastructure of the program. In this case, the users subscribe to the software instead of purchasing it. This kind of services is usually adopted by businesses who want to benefit from application usage without investing much amount on the licenses.

Happy Learning 🙂