Cloud Computing Advantages

In cloud computing, the word cloud (also phrased as "the cloud") is used as a metaphor for "the Internet," so the phrase cloud computing means "a type of Internet-based computing," where different services -- such as servers, storage and applications -- are delivered to an organization's computers and devices through the Internet.

Cloud computing is used to describe a variety of different types of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers that are connected through a real-time communication network (typically the Internet).
In science, cloud computing is a synonym for distributed computing over a network and means the ability to run a program on many connected computers at the same time.

Advantages :

The cloud focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of the shared resources. Cloud resources are usually not only shared by multiple users but as well as dynamically re-allocated as per demand. This can work for allocating resources to users in different time zones.

 For example, a cloud computer facility which serves European users during European business hours with a specific application (e.g. email) while the same resources are getting reallocated and serve North American users during North America's business hours with another application (e.g. web server). This approach should maximize the use of computing powers thus reducing environmental damage as well, since less power, air conditioning, rackspace, and so on, is required for the same functions.

Proponents claim that cloud computing allows companies to avoid upfront infrastructure costs, and focus on projects that differentiate their businesses instead of infrastructure.

 Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand. 

Hosted services :

In marketing, cloud computing is mostly used to sell hosted services in the sense of application service provisioning that run client server software on a remote location.

Such services are given popular acronyms like 'SaaS' (Software as a Service), 'PaaS' (Platform as a Service), 'IaaS' (Infrastructure as a Service), 'HaaS' (Hardware as a Service) and finally 'EaaS' (Everything as a Service). End users access cloud-based applications through a web browser or a light-weight desktop or mobile app while the business software and user's data are stored on servers at a remote location.

The 1990s.. Began to use the cloud symbol :

In the 1990s, telecommunications companies,who previously offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering virtual private network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service, but at a lower cost. By switching traffic as they saw fit to balance server use, they could use overall network bandwidth more effectively. 

They began to use the cloud symbol to denote the demarcation point between what the provider was responsible for and what users were responsible for. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.

 As computers became more prevalent, scientists and technologists explored ways to make large-scale computing power available to more users through time sharing, experimenting with algorithms to provide the optimal use of the infrastructure, platform and applications with prioritized access to the CPU and efficiency for the end users. 

Since 2000..

After the dot-com bubble, Amazon played a key role in all the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers, which, like most computer networks, were using as little as 10% of their capacity at any one time, just to leave room for occasional spikes. 

Having found that the new cloud architecture resulted in significant internal efficiency improvements whereby small, fast-moving "two-pizza teams" (teams small enough to feed with two pizzas) could add new features faster and more easily, Amazon initiated a new product development effort to provide cloud computing to external customers, and launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a utility computing basis in 2006.

 In early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open-source, AWS API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds. In early 2008, OpenNebula, enhanced in the RESERVOIR European Commission-funded project, became the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds, and for the federation of clouds. 

Growth and popularity : 

                     

The development of the Internet from being document centric via semantic data towards more and more services was described as "Dynamic Web".

This contribution focused in particular in the need for better meta-data able to describe not only implementation details but also conceptual details of model-based applications.

The present availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented architecture, autonomic, and utility computing have led to a growth in cloud computing.

Origin of the term

The origin of the term cloud computing is unclear. The expression cloud is commonly used in science to describe a large agglomeration of objects that visually appear from a distance as a cloud and describes any set of things whose details are not inspected further in a given context.

• Meteorology: a weather cloud is an agglomeration.
• Mathematics: a large number of points in a coordinate system in mathematics is seen as a point cloud;
• Astronomy: stars that appear crowded together in the sky are known as nebula (latin for mist or cloud), e.g. the Milky Way;
• Physics: The indeterminate position of electrons around an atomic kernel appears like a cloud to a distant observer

In analogy to above usage the word cloud was used as a metaphor for the Internet and a standardized cloud-like shape was used to denote a network on telephony schematics and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams. The cloud symbol was used to represent the Internet as early as 1994, in which servers were then shown connected to, but external to, the cloud symbol.

References to cloud computing in its modern sense can be found as early as 2006, with the earliest known mention to be found in a Compaq internal document. Urban legends claim that usage of the expression is directly derived from the practice of using drawings of stylized clouds to denote networks in diagrams of computing and communications systems or that it derived from a marketing term.The term became popular after Amazon.com introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006.

The Goal of Cloud Computing  :

            Cloud Computing is the result of evolution and adoption of existing technologies and paradigms. The goal of cloud computing is to allow users to take benefit from all of these technologies, without the need for deep knowledge about or expertise with each one of them. The cloud aims to cut costs, and help the users focus on their core business instead of being impeded by IT obstacles.

 The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization abstracts the physical infrastructure, which is the most rigid component, and makes it available as a soft component that is easy to use and manage.

By doing so, virtualization provides the agility required to speed up IT operations, and reduces cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. On the other hand, autonomic computing automates the process through which the user can provision resources on-demand. By minimizing user involvement, automation speeds up the process and reduces the possibility of human errors.

 Users face difficult business problems every day. Cloud computing adopts concepts from Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) that can help the user break these problems into services that can be integrated to provide a solution. 

Cloud computing is a kind of grid computing; it has evolved from grid computing by addressing the QoS (quality of service) and reliability problems. Cloud computing provides the tools and technologies to build data/compute intensive parallel applications with much more affordable prices compared to traditional parallel computing techniques.