There's a lot of buzz about cloud computing lately, but often the term is used in a vague or ambiguous way (such as Microsoft's "Take it to the Cloud!" commercials). All the hype may leave you scratching your head and asking the question, "what exactly does cloud computing mean and why is it so popular?" The simplest definition of cloud computing refers to "the on-demand provision of computational resources (data, software) via a computer network, rather than from a local computer" (Wikipedia). Recently, Google has taken this definition to an extreme with the introduction of their Chromebooks; these are computers but all of the applications and data are stored on the web instead of on the harddrive.
So basically cloud computing is a movement to host more applications on the web instead of your computer. This definition alone is very loose, not particularly extraordinary, and does not fully explain the mystique of cloud computing. Actually, there are a few other qualifiers often attributed to cloud computing that contribute to its popularity especially regarding web development. A cloud service usually is elastic, is fully managed by the provider, and is sold on demand. I will attempt to explain these attributes in more detail in the following paragraphs.
A cloud service is elastic - "a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time". A cloud application is automatically scaled and load balanced as traffic increases; this is accomplished by automatically spinning up additional servers and distributing requests across these servers to meet demand. The obvious advantage here is that you do not have to manage these details yourself in the case that your application is growing larger and requires more resources (this leads into the next point).
A could service is fully managed by the provider - "the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access". Cloud applications tend to run on a complex distributed network of virtualized machines that are both efficient and highly available. If one server goes down the burden will be shifted and another server will instantly replace it (guaranteeing nearly 100% up-time). This sophisticated architecture is fully supplied by the provider and mostly runs in the background; it does not require any physical resources from or direct administration by the user.
A cloud service is sold on demand - in other words you "pay for only for what you use" measured as combination of bandwidth usage, storage usage, number of requests, number of web service/api calls, etc. As a result, a user can take full advantage of the cloud services for a minimal investment. This can mean significant cost savings for businesses, especially small to medium sized businesses. Because of this cloud computing has become increasingly popular during this weak economy.
A few of the most prominent cloud providers are Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and Google. Although I believe Amazon is probably the most popular of these offerings, I have only experimented with Google App Engine, and it is my favorite so far because it supports a Java development environment and... it's free! (within limits, see below).
Google App Engine generously allows a free quota of 500MB of storage and 5 million page views per month. As a result I have used Google App Engine to host my Java applications for the past couple of years without paying a dime. If you want to host simple applications for personal use then I would highly recommend Google App Engine. However, there are some limitations associated with Google App Engine that can be frustrating. Therefore, if you want to host complex applications for commercial use then I would probably recommend a different provider such as Amazon.
I copied, quoted, and paraphrased much of the information in this post from the following link:
http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-computing
No comments:
Post a Comment