{"id":17255,"date":"2020-07-29T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-29T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mygreatlearning.com\/blog\/what-is-cloud-computing\/"},"modified":"2024-12-17T14:09:57","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T08:39:57","slug":"what-is-cloud-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mygreatlearning.com\/blog\/what-is-cloud-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Cloud Computing? How Does It Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cloud Computing has gained immense popularity in the last half a decade. It has made waves in the IT, Technology, and Business worlds. This has led to a surge in global spend in the Cloud Computing domain. So what is Cloud Computing? Why is it popular? We will be answering these and many other important questions in this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So let us get started and\nunderstand the need for Cloud Computing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Cloud Computing?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To understand Cloud Computing, we need to go back to times when cloud computing was not used extensively or did not exist. Not too back, if we go 15-20 years back from now, we would realize that application hosting and businesses ran very differently. Let us consider this example of application hosting. In order to host an application, we needed to set up an infrastructure, which we still do, but very differently. Back then you had to buy a stack of servers. These servers were way costly than they are today. This meant there were a lot of upfront costs involved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was not the only concern.\nWe also needed skilled professionals to setup these infrastructures. And also\nto maintain and monitor these infrastructures. First of getting such\nprofessionals at a scale was a task and also the people available would charge\na lot for these services. So again we had to pay a lot of money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other problem was the nature\nof businesses. In application hosting, you will always be catering to traffic\nthat is not constant. At times you will experience traffic in high volume.\nSometimes the traffic goes to negligible. With lack of proper scalability for\nthese resources, updating infrastructure to the needs of this business was a\nvery tedious task. This meant as a business owner I had to pre plan all\ninvestment, look after the resources who could take care of these activities.\nAnd yet no be sure of the fact that all planning would help my application\nfunction as planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This meant running such\nactivities was limited to people with lot of investment. And there were quite a\nlot of loose ends that still needed mending. What was needed here was an\napproach that could solve all these problems. And this is where cloud computing\nstepped in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us understand what it is\nexactly,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Cloud Computing?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To understand Cloud Computing,\nlet us consider this analogy,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloud Computing is similar to electricity boards, that supply electricity to our homes. To give you an example, we all consume electricity at home. We turn on our fans, bulbs, TV sets, Washing Machines, and all this happens at a mere click of a button. We press the buttons and electricity runs through our home appliances. We do not have to worry about who supplies this electricity to our homes. Neither do we have to worry about how it is supplied, how it is maintained. The electricity provider takes care of all these issues. What we do, at the end of the month we get a bill saying that these are units of electricity consumed and this is the amount we need to pay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, Cloud Computing is like\nyour electricity board. But instead they provide cloud computing or application\nhosting and quite few other services in similar manner. Let us take a look at a\nbookish definition before we move any further,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Cloud Computing enables on-demand services like compute,\nstorage, networking, etc which can be accessed through the internet and the\nuser is not required to manage these resources\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So to simplify it further, Cloud Computing addresses all the\nconcerns that we discussed in the Why bit of Cloud Computing. It provides:<\/p>\n\n\n\n