Cloud is on-demand accessibility of computer system resources, especially computing power and data storage without direct active management by the user. Term is generally used to describe the data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, largest today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server.
The Cloud may be limited to a single organization (enterprise clouds), will be available to many organizations (public cloud) or a combination of both (hybrid cloud).
Cloud relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale. Advocates of public and hybrid clouds note that the cloud computing allow companies to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs. Cloud allows to the enterprises get their applications up and running faster with improve manageability and less maintenance. That enables IT teams to more quickly resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable demand. Linux was most used type of operating systems, including in Microsoft’s offerings and is thus described as dominant.
In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and access data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is a symbol of the Internet. Cloud is not about your hard drive. When you store the data run the programs from hard drive, that’s called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you that mean accessing your data is fast and easy for that one computer or others on the local network.
The cloud is also not about having dedicated network attached storage (NAS) server in residence. Storing the data on a home or office network does not count as utilizing the cloud. For it to be considered “cloud” you need to access your data or your programs over the Internet or at the very least, include that data synced with other information over the Web. A big business, you may know all there is to know about what’s on the other side of the connection; as an individual user, you may never have an idea what kind of massive data processing happening on the other end. The end result is the same: through an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere anytime.
A cloud system or cloud computing technology refers to the computing components (hardware, software and infrastructure) that enable the delivery of cloud computing services such as: SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) via a network (i.e. the Internet). Cloud services using a web browser, which represents a computing model that shifts the computing workload to a remote location. Cloud is also sometimes referred to as utility computing, since consumer usage of cloud systems is metered and to be paid in a manner similar to a commodity like water or electric services.
There are two key elements of cloud technology, they are: SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and cloud virtualization, these are described in further detail below:
SOA Architecture is a part of cloud technology. It allows organizations to access the cloud based computing solutions with features can be modified on demand as well as business needs change. SOA places the responsibility costs of development and maintenance of web service components on the web services provider, which allows a web services consumer to access various web services.
Cloud Virtualization is another important feature of a cloud system that facilitates the efficient delivery of cloud computing services. The implementation of virtual computing resources in the cloud, that take off the functionality of physical computing resources, serves as a flexible load balancing management tool that allows for the swift adjustment of computing services. Virtualization is very important component of cloud computing technology for the purposes of disaster recovery and fail-over support.