What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the next state in the evolution of the internet

The cloud in cloud computing provides the means throughw hich everything from computing power to coputing infrastructure applications, business proceess to personal collaboration, can be delivered to you as a serveice, wheereve adn whenever you need.

Clouds are fluida dn can easily expanda or contract.

This elasticity of the cloud means that users can request qdditional resources aon demand anad jus ast as easily depoirvisiton or release those resources when ytey're no longer needed,.

This elasticitiy is one of the main reasons indivuduals, businesses adn IT users are moving to the cloud.


Cloud computing infrastructures maie it easier for cmpanie sto treat their computing systems as a pool of resources rather than a set of independent environments that eadh has to be managed.

4 Basic Characteristics of the Cloud.

1. Elaasticity and abillity to scale up and down
2. Self-service provisioning and automatic deprovisiioning
3. Applicaton programing interfaces (APIs)
4. Billing and metering of service usage in a pay-as-you-go model


Good cloud services must have a comprehensive approach to service management and a well-definied process for security management.

The evolution of data centre management
over time, it became easier for IT Service Providers to add hardware to the data centre rather than to focus on making the dtata centre itself, more effective. By doing so, IT ensured that critical applications woldn't run out of resources. At the same time, these companies built or bought sofaware to meet their business needs - large cmmoplex applications were built to run in large data centres, and modified to meet changing business needs.


Technlogoy advancements such as virtualization, service oriented architecture and service managment have helped address some of th e needs of companies adn their IT service providers, as they strive to manage huge adn unqieldy business software adn data centre constraints. These technolgoy enablers have helped companies become more efficient adn cost effective - however teh cloud promises to improve their abillity to leveragte what they've bought and make use of external resources, designed to be used , on deamnd.

Note: Some applications wil simply not be successful when thron up on tht ecloud - virtualize adion also ads some performance implications. A database bound application will remain data base bound, regardless of the additional compute resources beneather it.



Important beneft if cloud computing: abillity to add new instratructure capacity quicly and at lower costs. (enables companies to gain IT resources whilst saving time and money. Typical cloud service providers have economies of scale - resulting int eh ability to spread fixed costs over more customers.

Organizations can try out new aplications without having to invest int eh hardware, sofaware or networking capacity.