Why Cloud Computing? Should I care?
Cloud computing has some attractive advantages over in-house computing resources. Below is a synopsis of these advantages.
Reduced Capital Expenditure: Using cloud platform means no physical procurement or installation of computational resources. The resources are provisioned over the Internet using a web browser, and are paid for using a pay-per-use model or subscription model. For example, Amazon charges 15 cents per gigabyte of S3 storage each month, and 10 to 80 cents per hour for EC2 server capacity, depending on configuration. According to Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, “Amazon is $70 to $150 fully burdened for a server, versus $400 per month for an enterprise.”
Faster Deployment of Application: The use of the Internet to do the provisioning of computational resources means time to deploy an application will be reduced. The cloud computing builder vendors provide services to make this deployment easier. For example CohesiveFT provides easy to use tools to assemble a software environment of OS, database management, and other software required to run the application and to deploy on a variety of cloud infrastructures. 3Tera facilitates graphical assembly of software components to build the software environment, and their deployment over its grid engine. Scalr and RightScale provide the same support for Amazon EC2.
Scale Your Infrastructure to Infinity (almost): Since cloud infrastructure vendors have a large collection of servers and storage, any quick need for large computing resources can be served with a few mouse clicks. This allows businesses to try out experimental applications or services that have heavy computing needs.
Inaccurate capacity planning is OK: The cloud computing platform is intended o scale at will (as stated previously), so it is possible to get extra computing cycles or storage fairly quickly.
Manage Applications Remotely: The applications that run on the cloud can be managed remotely through programmable interfaces that are exposed by the cloud vendors. Google Data APIs allow direct interaction with the applications hosted in its platform.
No Long Term Commitment: Cloud vendors do not require any long term contract from its users, which permits the users to switch clouds, or use different clouds for different purposes.
Access from Anywhere, Anytime: Since the cloud infrastructure can be accessed over the Internet, the applications deployed over them can also be accessed over the Internet from anywhere or anytime by the end users of the application, or its developers.