The tutorial provides the basic concepts of cloud computing, cloud computing overview and features, increasing demand for cloud computing applications, characteristics and advantages of cloud computing, cloud deployment models, cloud service models. The cloud computing tutorial is useful for both beginners and professionals.

What is cloud ?

The cloud term depicts the usage of application through internet or network. In other words, applications which are not installed within the organization premises but can be accessed by organization staff through network ( LAN, WAN, VPN) or internet.

What is cloud computing ?

Cloud computing is the virtualization based technology which allows users to create, configure, install applications, development platform, security services, virtual machines, servers and memory allocation, database servers including NoSQL databases like MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, File processing, image processing, documents and videos via an internet connection. These applications are not installed and managed locally but are provided as services to the end users based on their need. Amazon AWS Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure Cloud Services , Oracle Cloud Services and Google Cloud Services are the few popular cloud service providers.

Cloud computing provides the platform independence as it is managed by cloud service providers and not installed locally and thus makes it more suitable options for the customers for reducing their hardware cost, software cost and maintenance and upgrade of the overall infrastructure.

What are Cloud Types ?

The availability of applications to the customers are broadly divided into below given types:

• Private Cloud: The Private cloud is an isolated or private cloud environment where systems , applications and resources are accessible within an organization.
• Public Cloud: The public cloud is an cloud environment where systems , applications and resources are accessible to the general public.
• Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid cloud is a mix of private cloud and public cloud where critical applications are maintained and accessed through private cloud and non-critical applications are managed and accessed by public cloud. For example , Banking Applications with customer and business data could be managed through private cloud and Banking process , user complaints and other non-critical applications through public cloud.
• Community Cloud: The community cloud allows systems , applications and resources to be accessible through group of organizations.

Cloud Service Models

The cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft , Oracle and Google provides the cloud environment to their customers based on the below given cloud service models:

• SaaS (Software-as-a-service) : SaaS is the computing service which allows users to access the software applications as a service. Oracle Cloud Procurement, Oracle Cloud Financials are few commonly used software applications.
• PaaS (Platform-as-a-service): PaaS is the cloud computing service where provides the cloud environment for application development, application deployment and application tools, etc
• IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service): IaaS is the cloud computing service which allows users to manage the Infrastructure through internet. Users can configure the required physical servers, virtual servers, memory allocation based on their usage.

Increase demand of Cloud computing

The cloud services are becoming popular among the users due to the below given advantages:

• The cloud applications are accessible to the users as a service via internet
• The cloud applications are configurable as per the user need
• The hardware and software installations , maintenance and upgrade is managed by the cloud service providers
• PaaS service provides the development platform, development and deployment tools.
• The cloud computing provides users the option to access cloud application based on pay-per-use model which includes charges as per the usage of services.
• The cloud computing provides different ways for data storage for file, images and application data. Users can also classify which data is required for immediate access and which is required for data reporting and cloud service charges applicable accordingly.
• The cloud computing provides advanced security features which also makes it a secure option for data processing.

Limitation of Cloud computing

Although cloud computing provides numerous advantages but still has some limitations

• Customer will have limited control as cloud environments are owned and managed by cloud service providers.
• Cloud applications are accessible through internet. Slow internet connectivity may leads to the slowness of the application
• Usage of cloud applications over internet open the threat of misuse of critical client data through hacking.
• Customers using the specific cloud service provider cannot shift or transfer to another cloud service provider as each cloud service provider has its own cloud platforms and thus requires high efforts in redeploying and stabilizing the running applications