The Basics of Cloud Computing Environments

What do people mean when they say that something is in the cloud? They can’t mean that it is literally in cumulus clouds, right? We’re going to take a look at the basics of cloud computing environments and relevant topics with this simple guide.

The Essentials of the Cloud

When an application is in the cloud, it means that it is hosted over the internet. That means that the provider of the service could deploy their application quickly without having to worry about significant infrastructure costs and other components that relate to setting up and maintaining infrastructure. 

Services and companies still have to make sure they are containing their costs and staying aware of changes in application use. But they can worry less about the infrastructure and more about the customers by moving their infrastructure to the cloud.

There’s several segments in this sector.

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

PaaS – Platform as a Service

SaaS – Software as a Service

Remember that software applications are comprised of several critical components.

These components include servers, load balancers, file storage, and networking. One would overlay an operating system, runtime environment, then application data, and data sets.

Why Companies Prefer the Cloud

Companies switch over to the cloud environment so that they can deploy products faster, control costs, move quickly, and pay per-use. 

If you are going with a lean startup approach, you want to keep all your costs low and focus on the end-user. 

Leaders of startups don’t want to spend significant portions of capital upfront with massive uncertainty on the potential adoption of their product. Hence, Cloud Services at VentureDive and various other enterprises present the best possible solution for their clients in terms of adopting cloud infrastructure at a reasonable cost throughout.

What’s great about the cloud is the aspect of just-in-time-infrastructure.

That seems like a complicated word, but it merely means that you can take advantage of infrastructure on demand. Pay for what you use and only for what you need. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to project demand and invest in applications based on your expectations.

The cloud allows you to adjust your infrastructure as you need to.

Did you know that many cloud providers don’t require a monthly subscription?

They only charge you according to your service use. That means that startups don’t have to worry about signing long-term contracts for simple experiments.

Businesses find that the cloud can provide computing elasticity and cost savings in numerous ways.

How?

Scale Your Environment in Multiple Ways

The cloud computing environments provided by companies such as Amazon Web Services allows startups and growing businesses to scale in and scale out as they need.

Businesses can choose to scale or vertically scale horizontally.

Horizontally scaling applications means that they add more resources to handle excess capacity. 

Vertically scaling means that they increase the specifications in a current resource to handle more demand and processing in their cloud computing environments.

Fascinating material, right?

There’s much more to the cloud but this should give you a great idea of what the cloud is and the value that it provides.