What is Cloud Computing

• Cloud Computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet (mentioned that internet is otherwise known as the cloud)
• Cloud Computing is:
  • On demand computing resources, delivered to you over the Internet
  • A computing service you traditionally did local (on-premises), now performed remotely, across the Internet(off-premises)
• According to VMware - “Cloud computing is an approach to computing that leverages the efficient pooling of an on-demand, self-managed, virtual infrastructure.”
• Cloud Computing service gives you access to a massive pool of computing resources that allows to host web servers, email servers, databases, file storage servers, virtual machines, user directories, or anything else you might want
• Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/principles-cloud-computing/2-what-is-cloud-computing

Characteristics of a Cloud

• Elastic - Scales up or down quickly
• Metered - Pay only for what you use
• Self-Service - No (or reduced) need for IT Expert

Why Cloud Computing?

Normally businesses and companies have their own infrastructures. In order to create and maintain those infrastructures, companies need workforce and pays huge amount of money. Companies can pay hosting services to host server (i.e. email server, web server etc.) but would still cost huge money and workforce.
In Cloud computing, rather than runing own hardware or paying for use of hardware in someone else’s data center, you just pay for access to a massive pool of computing resources.

Advantages:

• Easy to maintain (less workforce needed)
• Less cost (i.e. Pay-as-you-go)
• Flexibility to scale up
• No need to change physical hardwares

Benefits of cloud computing

• Fast access to resources or applications
• Only pay for what you use
• No capital expenditure to get started
• Potential to eliminate the need for local IT staff to maintain infrastructure and applications
• Potential to lower costs
• Deploy what you need, yourself, with self-service
• Allow IT staff to instead focus on the business

Providers

List of major providers:

• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud
• Alibaba Cloud
• IBM Cloud
• Oracle
• Salesforce
• SAP
• Rackspace Cloud
• VMWare