What is cloud computing?
Source: Rich Rivera
The phrase cloud computing is a bit of a marketing misnomer. It’s clearly not computing in some ethereal cloud that mystically manifests on your computer screen. Put simply, cloud computing is essentially a metaphor for internet-based computing where services such as servers, storage and applications are delivered to an organization's computers and devices through the Internet.
You might say if that’s a simple definition you wouldn’t like a complex one with some justification. To put it another way think of a organisations IT infrastructure, such as banks of servers in a data centre, storage platforms, a raft of security technologies all of which has to be managed in-house. Now imagine the services that the infrastructure provides coming to you via the internet without the need for all that in-house hardware. And that’s cloud computing.
But of course this is IT and in the realm of technology there is very little that is so simple. But at one level cloud computing is simple. Cloud computing uses networks of large groups of servers with special connections to spread data-processing chores across them. The servers could be in one data centre or they might be spread across many different data centres which in turn could be scattered all around the world.
This shared IT infrastructure contains large pools of systems such as storage that are linked together. And virtualization techniques are used to maximize the power of cloud computing, to multiply the computing power and resource. Another way to think of it is rather than having locally-based servers or devices to handle applications you’re using shared resources, used by other people too.
In a way it’s similar to grid computing, where processing cycles of all computers in a network are used to solve problems too intensive for any stand-alone machine. A good example of this is the SETI project, the search for extra-terrestrial life. If you want to be involved you simply sign up and your computer is hooked up the network and its unused processing power is used in the project.
Cloud computing effectively does the same. It harnesses traditional supercomputing or high-performance computing power, to perform tens of trillions of computations per second. Except the end game isn’t to find ET but to provide applications, data storage and traditional IT services that you’d normally get from an in-house infrastructure.
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