What exactly cloud computing is? This is the latest and greatest thing we are all hearing about. And being the latest and greatest thing, marketers are all using this term for their marketing campaign so that they can get more customers and can get more money out of your pocket. For example Microsoft is currently running a campaign saying “Into The Cloud” where if someone log into the website and then they will see a big flashy thing going around saying “Into the Cloud” which is quite cool.
But the main problem is most people really don’t understand what cloud computing is. Simply speaking Cloud Computing is an overall philosophy and design concept. It is much more complicated and yet much simpler than what people give it credit for. So in this write up I would try to explain the concept and technology of cloud computing in a simpler fashion. Many of my subscriber has emailed me, text me and requested me to write on this.
The first thing of cloud computing that you need to understand is that, with cloud computing you are trying to separate the applications from both the operating system and from the hardware. What do I mean by this? Say you need to have an email service for you company, for which you will be needing a physical server [You know, a machine with CPU, RAM, power plug and etc etc]. On that hardware you then install a operating system say windows server 2008 and on top that you now installed Microsoft Exchange Server for email service. So look carefully, to provide the email service you had the Exhane server over the operating system over the hardware. So now the exchange server is dependent on many other factors! So if your operating system got some problem like attacked by virus or clod up with some other information than your email service goes down. Again if your CPU starts complaining say your CPU fan stops or the power goes out or hard drive crashes then it shuts your operating system which eventually shuts your exchange server and your email service stops. So the idea of cloud computing is to decentralize the application from the OS and Hardware.
You may hear of virtual computing, what it does is, it puts the OS into a container. This container is running on hardware. So if your hardware fails you can put that instance into another hardware and start over again at no time as It automatically migrates to another hardware. So now if you have redundancy using virtualization say you have three physical server than if one gets down it shifts to another CPU within the cluster. This is what I mean by separating the application from the OS and from the hardware. In brief, cloud computing has different component and there your application can migrate between different OS and HW.
This write-up is a fairly big one will discuss all the underlying concepts and technology of cloud computing. This is the first introductory part and I will gradually expand it into other detail segments. But before going into the detail I must clear one thing. People tend to think that Virtualization which I just talked about is clod computing. Virtualization is actually just a component of cloud computing and cloud computing is far more than the virtual computers. As we move forward you will find me talking about other components of cloud computing like web application, database clustering, terminal services, application server, virtualizations, hosted instances, hosted solutions, public vs private cloud and finally I will try to give some final thoughts on how these things binds together. So this is just the introduction of cloud computing hope you will be with me over the next couple of series.
Sami 