Question

What is cloud computing? Why is it important / what does it mean to the future of computing?

Answer 1

In the past few years, computers have had an expensive electronic parts to build a little processor output. However, Today’s computers have finally outsmarted its compactness. As computers consume large amount of power to process an output, those large computers are replaced at the end of last century by means of smaller computers that increases the efficiencies of processing power and infrastructure. In modern computer, the distributed system is well organized to meet the demand of data that increases usage rate of Internet users. In traditional computing, data cannot be accessed anywhere at any time so we need to store data in external storage system and it is costlier and management is hard. So we need ways to manage the volume, variety and availability of data. This leads us to the use of Cloud Computing.

In 2008, Cloud Computing has evolved a new distributed computing model with the broad range of applications over IT, business, software engineering and data storage. According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is a model that enables convenient, resource pooling, ubiquitous, on-demand access to deliver different types of service provider interaction”. In cloud computing, users pay for the service access as “pay-as-you-go” that minimizes the resource constraints such as processor, memory, hard disk, operating system, networking etc. in order to implement end-user virtualization.

NIST provides the deployment models namely public, private, hybrid, and community cloud that discusses essential characteristics like ubiquitous network access, rapid elasticity, measured services, on demand self service and resource pooling. Finally, service delivery models including Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to offer cloud computing services.