What is Cloud computing?

Cloud computing is getting extremely popular these days. Especially if you have a high traffic website / web based application and you don’t want to spend too much into hosting high end dedicated servers – cloud computing / cloud hosting is what you are looking for,.

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Basically a cloud is a virtualization of resources that manages and maintains itself. Broadly classified under the three categories:

IaaS: Infrastructure as a service. PasS: Platform as a service. SaaS: Software as a service.

So how does a cloud hosting differentiate with other hosting? The most important diffence is that cloud computing is sold “on demand”. This also means that there is no binding on you to buy heavy duty hosting servers and be worried about how to manage, maintain and keep on paying for the extra resources where you don’t need any. This on demand service is typically sold by hour or minute and has no load on the customer to worry about the maintenance or paying for extra space or bandwidth. Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.

Typically there are two types of clouds – Public and Private. A public cloud as the name says – sells services to anyone on the Internet where as a Private cloud is more like a proprietary network or a data center that caters to a limited number of people for hosting services.

Infrastructure as a Service (IasS):

A successful example of cloud computing providers would be Amazon Web services that provides virtual server instances with unique IP address and blocks of storage on demand. An Amazon web service is extremely popular and apart from Amazon there are other reliable and efficient providers such as GoGrid and Rackspace. As the service involves users to pay as they need – its often highly beneficial and can be translated to other ulitity services used such as telephone, electricity and often this model is also called as utility computing. Benefits to the clients:

Stop worrying about heavy traffic and bandwidth requirements. Pay as you go. No need to buy high configuration servers from day one. Low maintenance. Platform as a Service (PaaS):

Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider’s infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider’s platform over the Internet. PaaS providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer’s computer. Force.com, (an outgrowth of Salesforce.com) and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Developers need to know that currently, there are not standards for interoperability or data portability in the cloud. Some providers will not allow software created by their customers to be moved off the provider’s platform.

Software as a Service (SaaS):

In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere. There are several successful SaaS model running all over the web.

Agile Technosys: Cloud computing

Agile Technosys has indepth expertise with Cloud computing especially with models of IaaS (cloud hosting) and SaaS (Software as a Service). Agile Technosys has been vital in creating some very complex SaaS models including some very niche domain areas.

With Cloud hosting – Agile Technosys has terrific experience with Amazon and GoGrid. As a matter of fact we recommend cloud hosting to every of our customers – which helps in lowering the overall project implementation costs.