What are Cloud Computing Services

Today every business is moving to Cloud. The World of Cloud AWS, Azure, VMC is growing with each day. The cloud can be a private, public or hybrid cloud.

Why Cloud services ?. Conventional client server models or thin client services were deployed on own servers resulting in high startup costs and equally high maintenance costs. Cloud computing gives decentralized and low cost for end users as they pay as they use. Also cloud architecture provides the following benefits.

  • Disaster recovery : Data clusters all over the world provide mechanism to clone your data at any part of the world.
  • Availability : The cloud computing services has 24x7 availability with downtime as low as 0.001% due to highly trained professionals working 24x7.
  • Scalability : Can grow RAM and CPU computing power as traffic to end users application increases. This is beneficial to the end user who can pay for the costs as their revenue increases.
  • No Costs : Some basic services on Cloud are free, like AWS gives 1 year free subscription. Gmail is free for 30 DB data storage.
  • Simplicity : Web and other applications are simple to deploy with all technicalities of servers and networking being handled by the Cloud service providers.
  • Automatic software updates : Software updates can be delivered to end users or to customers automatically to keep the systems up to date. This reduces the issues of multiple versions being used by customers reducing the support time.
  • Collaboration : Same software usage and viewing the same data from different parts of the world. Same data can be edited by different people ex: Google sheets.
  • Security : Cloud servers are protected by 64 bit encryption keys and they can be accessed only by valid users posing the public keys. This gives high security to deployed software or apps running on the cloud servers.

Cloud Computing services are categorized as SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, CaaS, FaaS.

1. SaaS Software as a Service Software: developed and hosted as a Service on the internet to customers using a thin client like a web browser is called SaaS. Ex: SAP, Salesforce CRM, Gmail. All these software are hosted on cloud and used by customers as service; these can be paid or free services. GMAIL is a free service and Salesforce is an example for paid SaaS service.

2. IaaS Infrastructure as a Service : This provides basic to high end infrastructure like Virtual machines, Network, Storage, Software. The end customer can configure and use the platform deploying applications on it according to his/her requirements. Ex: AWS (EC2), Microsoft Azure (VM) Users don't have to buy or invest on any servers and can use Servers in various parts of the world for competitive prices.

3. PaaS Platform as a Service : This provides a platform which allows end users to develop the software, test, and release softwares without investing on buildings and other infrastructure. Ex: AWS Beanstalk, Google App Engine, Heroku.

You can develop an app and deploy it on any technology of your choice line Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Java .NET)

4. CaaS Container as a Service : This is container based virtualization were engines, underlying computing resources and orchestration are delivered to end users as a service from a cloud service provider. Ex: AWS ECS, Google Container Engine GKE,

5 FaaS Function as a Service :This is similar to PaaS which provides services to end users to develop, test and release software without investing on buildings and hardware infrastructure. This is based on event architecture where the developers write a piece of code without investing their time on hassles of deployment, server limitations, scalability. FaaS is auto scalable based on the traffic being hitting this piece of code of the function. AWS lambda,