An Introduction of Cloud Computing for Beginners

It’s very unlikely that you may not have heard about Cloud Computing.

If you are working as a System Admin, Infrastructure Engineer and keen to learn (you should be) about Cloud, then the following will give you a basic idea.

Why Cloud Computing?

One of the first questions you can ask yourself.

Let’s say there is no cloud computing right now, and you want to host your website and have all website pages developed and ready for your laptop, now you want to make it public.

The first thing you need to do is buy physical server hardware and host it in a data center with a public IP address. Secondly, you need to install an operating system on the server and web services to run your website.

Now you are ready to publish your website, but the issue is you have already invested a lot of time and money in getting your site available on the internet.

Right from buying server hardware to hosting in a data center, this process will cost you around 1000s of dollars, and time-consuming is from few days to weeks.

This was the situation 10-15 years back.

In Cloud Computing, you don’t buy new server hardware. Instead, you rent it for as long as you want, which can be as little as for few minutes.

Secondly, you don’t have to manage operating systems and web services; a cloud service provider manages it.

You get a button to upload your website content, and once data is uploaded, your website is available for the public.

This process costs you around few dollars and gets ready in few minutes.

Ex: you can get it started with DigitalOcean for as little as $5 per month.

Easy life. Isn’t it?

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is a process of accessing the different types of resources over the Internet.

For example, if your data is growing, you need to buy a higher capacity disk to store your data and carry it along with you to data availability whenever you required.

However,  in cloud computing, you can rent cloud storage and access it from any device connected to the internet. Also, you pay for storage that is used.

Similarly, you can buy any infrastructure services on-demand and scale up or down when necessary.

Types of Cloud Computing

There are mainly 3 types of cloud computing available today,

1. Public Cloud
2. Private Cloud
3. Hybrid Cloud

Public Cloud –  It is a standard cloud computing model where a service provider’s resources are shared across different clients.

For example: if you rent 10GB of public cloud storage, you will get the requested capacity of a disk from a bigger chunk of a single storage device that is logically divided into small parts and distributed to multiple users isolated to make it private across different clients.

Advantage

• Scalable: resources can be increased and reduced on-demand
• Reliable: High availability model, no single point of failure
• Cost-efficient: you pay only for what you use.

Disadvantage

• Shared resources: Not a reliable privacy
• Security: it cannot be used for private and sensitive information

Private Cloud – As the name says, Private Cloud has all resources dedicated to your application. It can be either from a cloud service provider or your company’s data center.

It gives complete control for data security and privacy. Private Cloud provides an additional layer of protection to process sensitive and confidential information.

Advantage

• Better Security: resources are dedicated and not shared with anyone
• Reliable: greater performance
• Quality: with performance comes quality.

Disadvantage

• Expensive: it is costlier than a public cloud and required IT expertise to manage it.

Hybrid Cloud – It is a combination of Public Cloud and Private Cloud.

You can host your public service in the Public cloud and confidential and sensitive data related services in the Private Cloud.

It offers a very flexible and comprehensive benefit of both models.

Advantage

• Scalable: you can increase your services from a Public cloud and Scale to Private as per demand.
• Cost-efficient: you don’t have to set up 100% infrastructure for private cloud
• Security: you can continue to run confidential processes in the Private Cloud.
• Flexible: you have a choice to choose Cloud infrastructure

Disadvantage

• Security: There are small chances of security breaching thru the public cloud.

I hope the above gives you an idea about it.

Read about various cloud service models.

If you are interested in learning about cloud computing, then the good news is you can get it started with a free online course or paid ones on Udemy.