Cloud Computing Explained

What’s all the buzz about cloud computing and what’s this new engineering marvel? I wondered and searched Wikipedia only to find this introduction “Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, Service-oriented architecture and utility computing. Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.” Now I had two options :
1. Try to figure out the meanings of these arcane terms like visualization, Service oriented architecture (which I initially thought of as some concept in building restaurants), abstraction etc. or
2. Leave it to some other expert to simplify it for me.

I thought of the latter initially but then I recalled the real definition of an expert – “Expert is someone who thinks he is one”. So I decided to become an expert on cloud computing and here I am writing my first article about it. This one is for all of you who hate jargon and want things explained in simple, easy to understand language. So here you go:

What do you do if you need some milk, do you buy a cow or buy a carton/pack of milk? What do you do if you want to throw a dinner for 100 people, do you buy 100 sets of utensils or rent them? What do you do if you need to take 45 people out for a short excursion? Buy a Bus or Hire one? Most people would tend to the latter. Why? Because it is better to bring in extra capacity/high value or difficult to maintain stuff only for the time it is needed rather than keeping it always. Cloud computing works on the same principle.

Why buy a 1 TB hard drive and buy another one once you have the first one fully occupied? Instead- keep your data with Google –they have enough storage place. You just pay for the amount of space you use. Why buy an expensive software for one time use, just use it on demand and pay for your usage – that’s software on demand for you. If your computer doesn’t have a game installed on it, no problem just go to the cloud and play it from a machine where it is installed and just pay for the time for which you play. There can be millions of such on demand applications which will reside on the cloud and you can just use them ‘on demand’ as and when required – and pay as you use.

So cloud is a network of interconnected computers which can share anything from the processor time to storage space to applications software – only pre-requisite, internet connectivity and of course money to pay for the ‘On demand service’.

I shall write some other time about its business implications, but I hope till that time you can also try to become an expert on cloud. 😀