Monday, April 8, 2019
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing
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| Cloud Computing |
In this
post, we'll be discussing what cloud computing is and the fundamental change it
brings in how we view and think about computing. To better understand the
massive revolution cloud computing will bring and is bringing to the field of
computing, let's first go back in time and view a similar revolution with
electricity.
Before the height of
the industrial revolution, electricity had to be generated in house, this had
many downsides: every worker lost to generating electricity was one less to
make the factory more productive and scalability was a major issue, at times when
production of the factory went up, there wouldn't be enough generated
electricity, causing power outages and a loss of production. Thus, often times
more electricity than needed was generated which was quite costly. Then in the The 1880s, Thomas Edison, founded the Edison Illuminating Company, turning
electricity into a utility. In other words, something that could be switched on
and off whenever desired, delivering the exact amount of power needed at a cost
per unit, in the case of electricity, watts.
Coming back to the present
day, this analogy has strong correlations to transformations seen in computing.
When running a website or application in the pre-cloud computing days, every
individual business with an online presence had to maintain servers that
allowed users to access their site, this is referred to as hosting. Like with
electricity, sometimes more users will access the site and sometimes there will
be little to no users on the site. To prevent site crashes on periods of high
traffic which therefore equated to lost users and customers, more servers than
needed often had to be purchased. These servers are very costly, racking up
bills even when they aren't used to full capacity. Also like the electricity
analogy, having a large team of sysadmins, network engineers, etc takes away
productivity from the true goal a business is trying to achieve, therefore
making the barrier to a scalable business high and costly.
Now, with cloud computing, we are witnessing a revolution in
how computing power is allocated, in other words, viewing computing as a
utility. Cloud computing has seen an incremental evolution over the past
decade, in large part due to the exponential increase in computing performance,
with cloud computing currently growing at a rate of 23 percent per year. Before
discussing the primary types of cloud computing, what exactly is it? Well, the
best way to think about it is to think about actual clouds. A cloud is formed
via a dense cluster of water molecules that appear as a single object from a
distance, thus taking this concept, cloud computing refers to a dense cluster
of computers working together that appear as a single computing resource. There
are many companies in the cloud computing race now, to list some of the biggest
cloud providers:
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud –
the list can go on and on.
Essentially, the cloud services these companies provide are
through vast data centers made for public use. As discussed previously, for a
business to manage its online presence, in-house servers and maintenance was
required, which racked up costly bills and was counterproductive to the true
goals of the business. This is where the first type of cloud computing came
into play:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service,
IaaS, where the hardware, in other words, the hosting environment was
abstracted away. Like with an electricity meter, businesses only pay the cloud
provider for the exact amount of computing power used. So, when there is a
heavy load on a cloud-hosted site, more is charged due to increased computing
demand, and with less traffic, significantly less is charged.
The next type of cloud computing is, Platform-as-a-Service,
PaaS, this is where the operating system and software backend is abstracted
away. While IaaS provides the infrastructure for hosting an application,
everything else involved in backend development is not covered. This is the
role PaaS fills, backend services, including data management in the form of
databases and middleware which is the plumbing between the components of an
application to make sure everything works together.
The last type of cloud computing we'll discuss is, Software-as-a-Service,
SaaS, this is where the software runtime is abstracted away, essentially a
layer in the cloud for program execution. This part of the cloud affects us,
the consumers, the most, allowing our devices to do minimal processing when
running an application because processing is instead done in the cloud and
results delivered to our devices.
This is the combination of all three types of cloud computing
we've discussed, more on this in the next section. A serverless future
provided through cloud computing is the new paradigm, this further exemplified
by the fact that the price of cloud computing is decreasing due to increasing
computing power. This is referred to as Bezos’s Law, where the CEO and founder
of Amazon stated: a unit of computing power price is reduced by approximately
50% every 3 years. The unit of measurement for the allocation of computing
power varies by provider due to the types of cloud computing they provide, for
example, per gigabyte of RAM used, per gigabyte of storage, kilowatt hours of
computing used, etc.
The reason for the drop in price and increase in power for
these units extend to topics we discussed in previous videos in this computing
series that deal with advances in both hardware and software such as GPUs like
Volta, new memory devices as well as standards and much more! When electricity
became a utility, the barrier to entry of a scalable business dropped and led
to innovation at an exponential rate, computing as the utility does this once
again. This is easily observable by startup culture today, where anyone with a
vision or idea can immediately establish an online presence and proof of the concept of their application or website. Whereas in the past, expensive servers
would have to be maintained and overhead of extra staff, now with cloud
computing and serverless architecture all of that is taken care of at a bare
minimal cost.
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