Cloud Computing - Pro's & Con's

World is moving fast and now everyone is migrating their data online for better safety and quick access. Cloud Computing is a new computing service through which users can access shared resources, software and information over a network.
Cloud Computing is a general term that delivers hosted services on the internet. It is a new technology where no installation of applications is required and users can access the files on any computer with internet access.
Yahoo, Gmail, Google Docs etc are the best real time examples of Cloud Computing where you don’t have to install any application on your system or server. Cloud Computing provides computation, data access, data management, storage resources to users and they can use it without having any knowledge of cloud infrastructure.

Types of Clouds

There are two types of clouds Public and Private.

• Public Cloud: Public Cloud is open for all the users connected to the internet. Here everyone shares and uses the same information without interrupting other users using the same cloud. This type of cloud requires very high bandwidth.
• Private Cloud: Private Cloud is only for the members or users of an organization which helps them to work use shared resources quickly and efficiently. This doesn’t require very high bandwidth.

How Does Cloud Computing Works

Before proceeding to concept of how it works first of all imagine a scenario in your mind. Suppose you are hosting a website on your machine or on local server then you have to install WAMP on windows or LAMP on Linux to keep your website live. However if you deploy your website on the cloud then you don’t have to think about your system configuration and operating system running on your machine or server. Now it the headache of the cloud service provider to give you require configuration and bandwidth on their server.
Now we will shift our focus How Does Cloud Computing Works? Cloud Computing is done through various layers known as Cloud Layers. There are five different layers used in Cloud Computing. Here is brief overview of each layer.

• Cloud Application Layer:- This layer is also known as Software as a Service (SaaS). It is most utilized and visible (Front-end) layer to the end-users using the cloud. This layer is completely for the use of users. Sometimes you have to pay some fee to use SaaS applications.
• Cloud Software Environment Layer: This is the second layer of Cloud Architecture and it is also known as Platform as a Service (PaaS). In this layer Application Developers role comes in play, Here developers develops and install new applications and deploys it on cloud to give more flexibility to cloud users.
• Cloud Software Infrastructure Layer: this is a basic cloud service layer which is also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It is a physical layer which manages the data, storage, firewalls etc on the cloud. This layer can be categorized into three parts: Computational resources, Data Storage and Communications.
• Software Kernel: This layer is also known as Operating System (OS) layer which ensures the system is working correctly and all the required applications have installed on it. This layer basically provides the software management for the physical servers that compose the cloud.
• Hardware and Firmware: This is the last and backbone layer of our Cloud which is also known as Hardware as a Service (HaaS) or Virtualization layer. This layer is the foundation of our cloud technology. In this layer, large number of virtual machines are connected and configured for the hosting of cloud.

Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing has following key characteristics:-

• It is not much expensive software to setup a cloud server.
• Applications can be easily migrated from one physical server to another.
• It is most reliable service to store data and data can be recovered after any disaster.
• Avoid Expense of updates and maintenance.
• Access program and files from anywhere.
• Run complicated programs without the technical experience.
• Allows the experts to do updates and preventative maintenance quickly
• It works smoothly and has high performance.
• It provides high security to our data and can recover any time after any misshapen.
• You don’t have to purchase licence copy of same software to run in an organization.

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

Nothing is perfect in this world. Everything has some drawbacks along with their benefits.

• Security is the major advantage in Cloud Computing but you have to trust on the cloud service providers for that.
• Whole our database is on third party’s hand and which again comes down to trust.

Cloud Computing has garnered so much popularity in short span of time and there are big named brands like Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc which are investing heavily in it.

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