Why cloud computing?
Any company or business unit can now build an entire application without a single server. Thanks to the consolidation of virtualisation and web-based technologies, on-demand computing through the Internet is now a reality; this is cloud computing.
The architecture and terminology of Cloud Computing is as clearly and precisely defined as, well, a Cloud. Cloud Computing is really a culmination of many technologies such as grid computing, utility computing, SOA, Web 2.0, and other technologies. Cloud computing allows delivering virtualized and dynamically scalable services at different levels, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Cloud Computing provides to organizations a new level of efficiency and economy to deliver IT services on demand:
IT Efficiency: Because Cloud Computing provides a way of deploying and accessing everything from single systems to huge amount of IT resources - on demand, in real time and at an affordable cost.
- Reduce capital expense: Cloud Computing makes possible for organizations to convert IT costs from capital expense to operating expense through technologies such as virtualization.
- Cut the cost of running your Data Center: Cloud Computing Improves IT infrastructure utilization rates and streamlines resource management.
- Eliminate Over-provisioning: Cloud Computing provides scaling on demand, which, when combined with utility prizing and pay-as-you-go, removes the need of over-provision to meet peak demands and removes the necessity of unused resources.
- Shifts the risk of Under-provisioning: Cloud Computing allows organizations to transfer the risk of mis-estimating workload to the Cloud Vendor. Companies can rapidly meet peak levels of their IT services. With the benefit of fulfilling SLAs and beaming potential new users.
Business Agility: Cloud Computing maximizes return using IT as a killer weapon through rapid time to market.
- Accelerated cycle: Cloud Computing gives a faster, more efficient way to develop new generation of applications or services. Provides faster development and testing cycles, reducing dramatically the time to market. Means that new business can be deployed in hours what used to take days, weeks, or even months.
- Increase agility: Cloud Computing helps change like not other paradigms. It increases flexibility in service creation. Organizations can more easily deploy and manage business-critical applications than with traditional IT infrastructures. It brings you the elasticity of adapt, change and upgrade easily your IT services.
- Fine grained billing model: No up-front costs. The pay-as-you-go billing model offered by Cloud Computing vendors allow organizations to pay for the IT resources it actually uses; it does not have to maintain multiple sets of artificially high levels of resources to handle peak demands. It can reduce dramatically your IT costs.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 and Google App Engine are examples of providers offering cloud-computing services.
· Amazon EC2 is the best example of Cloud Computing. It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity and sells the usage of their Compute Cloud on a per hour and per bandwidth basis. Users can install their own virtual images, based on Xen technology, and run their applications.
· Google App Engine is a simpler approach, allowing the execution of python-based applications on Google infrastructure Cloud. Cloud resources are accessed via a specific API provided by Google.
But building applications on top of the Cloud is challenging and requires experience in software and system architectures, from design to scaling and monitoring. At The Server Labs, we can build your whole application in the Cloud and optimise it to run on a Cloud. You won’t need to spend much money; neither purchase a single server, whilst resting assured that your application will be dynamic and highly scalable.
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