Cloud Service

 

Hi friends, 

You can see Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-party providers and made available to users through the internet. Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change. 

➧ Cloud services facilitate the flow of user data from front-end clients (e.g. users’ servers, tablets, desktops, laptops—anything on the users’ ends), through the internet, to the provider’s systems, and back. Users can access cloud services with nothing more than a computer, operating system, and internet connectivity or virtual private network (VPN).

🔼 What Is Cloud Computing? 🔼

➧ Cloud computing is the delivery of different services through the Internet. These resources include tools and applications like data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software. Rather than keeping files on a proprietary hard drive or local storage device, cloud-based storage makes it possible to save them to a remote database. As long as an electronic device has access to the web, it has access to the data and the software programs to run it. 

➧ Cloud platforms are a type of PaaS. And if the infrastructural components holding up the PaaS are highly scalable and sharable, it might be considered a cloud. The best examples of PaaS clouds include public clouds and managed private clouds.

🔼 What is a cloud service? 🔼

➧ The term "cloud services" refers to a wide range of services delivered on demand to companies and customers over the internet. These services are designed to provide easy, affordable access to applications and resources, without the need for internal infrastructure or hardware. 

➧ From checking email to collaborating on documents, most employees use cloud services throughout the workday, whether they’re aware of it or not. Cloud computing is a popular option for people and businesses for a number of reasons including cost savings, increased productivity, speed and efficiency, performance, and security. 

🔼 Cloud service types 🔼

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides users with computer, networking, and storage resources.

2. Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides users with a platform on which applications can run, as well as all the IT infrastructure required for it to run.

3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides users with—essentially—a cloud application, the platform on which it runs, and the platform’s underlying infrastructure.

4. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), an event-driven execution model, lets developers build, run, and manage app packages as functions without maintaining the infrastructure.

🔼 What are the benefits of cloud services? 🔼

The ability to scale

➧ Because the cloud service provider supplies all necessary infrastructure and software, there's no need for a company to invest in its own resources or allocate extra IT staff to manage the service. This, in turn, makes it easy for the business to scale the solution as user needs change—whether that means increasing the number of licenses to accommodate a growing workforce or expanding and enhancing the applications themselves.

Lowered costs

➧ Many cloud services are provided on a monthly or annual subscription basis, eliminating the need to pay for on-premises software licenses. This allows organizations to access software, storage and other services without having to invest in the underlying infrastructure or handle maintenance and upgrades.

Increased flexibility

➧ With cloud services, companies can procure services on an on-demand, as-needed basis. If and when there’s no longer a need for a particular application or platform, the business can simply cancel the subscription or shut down the service.

🔼 What is cloud-based technology? 🔼

➧ The first sense of cloud services covers a wide range of resources that a service provider delivers to customers via the internet, which, in this context, has broadly become known as the cloud. Characteristics of cloud services include self-provisioning and elasticity; that is, customers can provision services on an on-demand basis and shut them down when no longer necessary. 

➧ In addition, customers typically subscribe to cloud services, under a monthly billing arrangement, for example, rather than pay for software licenses and supporting server and network infrastructure upfront. In many transactions, this approach makes a cloud-based technology an operational expense, rather than a capital expense. From a management standpoint, cloud-based technology lets organizations access software, storage, compute and other IT infrastructure elements without the burden of maintaining and upgrading them.

Cloud services vs. web services

➧ Cloud services are sometimes deemed synonymous with web services. The two fields, although related, are not identical. A web service provides a way for applications or computers to communicate with each over the World Wide Web. 

➧ So, web services are generally associated with machine-to-machine communications, while cloud services are generally associated with scenarios in which individuals or corporate customers consume the service -- users accessing office productivity tools via a SaaS-based application, for example. Some web services, however, may be closely intertwined with cloud services and their delivery to individuals and organizations. Cloud services, for instance, often use RESTful web services, which are based on  representational state transfer (REST) technology. REST is viewed as providing open and well-defined interfaces for application and infrastructure services.