Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a technology which is growing rapidly in the IT industry. It involves in delivering hosted services over the internet often in a consumption-based model. These services can be divided in to three major categories, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Cloud computing gives you the ability to access resources independent of the hardware you use or your physical location. With cloud computing, rather than store information on your PC or mobile device you can accessed them via the internet. Also with cloud computing you don't need to download or install dedicated software on your PC, instead you can use service provider's software which indeed help freeing up on-board memory and reducing energy costs.

Some people often misunderstand cloud computing with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) but these two are different. SOA only provides software services to the clients, while in Cloud computing you actually get the chance to access to the hardware resources as well. So in a sense we can say that cloud computing is an extended version of SOA.

A cloud computing service can be either public or private. In public cloud anyone can buy the services. But in a private cloud, limited number of people will get the services which are provided by a proprietary network or a data center. If a particular service provider uses a public cloud resources to create their own private cloud, then it is called as a virtual private cloud.
Today the largest public cloud service provider in the world is the Amazon Web Services. As you can see though the word cloud computing is somewhat new, but its applications and usages are put into practice some time ago.

Whether it is private, public or virtual private, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy and scalable access to computing resources and IT services.