Cloud Computing

Introduction

Cloud Computing refers to a model used to access computing resources such as applications, networks, servers, storage and services via the internet. An example of how cloud computing works is when the user uses their computer and an Internet connection to make contact with a remote server. This server runs applications using its hardware. Users are then able to influence the application by executing commands through the Web browser or other user interface, the remote server is the part that carries out all the heavy lifting. An advantage of using Cloud Computing is that all of the resources can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort interaction. Google Cloud Services are managed by a service provider who operates the infrastructure and achieves economies of scale through multiple tenancy on their infrastructure. By moving to the cloud, the organizations’ IT (Information Technology) support department will be able to shift its focus on development rather than maintaining servers and it will also save costs dramatically over the high costs of on-premises infrastructure. Building on-premises infrastructure requires heavy upfront capital expenditures for items such as the server hardware which is expensive to purchase, install, configure and maintain. With cloud computing, organizations are given the freedom to pay only for the resources they use. Hence enabling businesses to spend their budget on the growth of the businesses rather than server hardware. In real-life, predicting the usage of the applications tend to be difficult. In the on-premises world, if an organization opt to buy too many servers, it will end up with expensive unused capacity. On the other hand, if the organization has too few servers, the customers will have a bad experience with the application. Cloud computing allows developers in the organization to easily scale up capacity to meet demand, and scale down capacity during quiet times to save cost.

Google’s Cloud Computing is called the Google Cloud Platform and it enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure. Built on the same infrastructure that allows Google to return billions of search results in milliseconds, serve 6 billion hours of YouTube video per month and provide storage for 425 million Gmail users. Google Cloud Platform’s locations provide low latency, low cost, and high availability. Google Cloud Platform offers data centers across the world to provide global coverage, low cost, low latency, and application availability for its users. Currently, Google Cloud Platform data centers are spread all out worldwide, including countries such as; Belgium, United States, Taiwan, and many other countries. The adoption of cloud computing by business may offer high-availability, reduction in operational staffing overhead, reduce infrastructure costs.