What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing allows access to arbitrary amounts of compute resources instantaneously. The computing resources exist on servers managed by the cloud providers, thereby, helping you avoid the hassle of hardware maintenance.

../_images/rise-of-clouds.jpg

Key advantages

../_images/Advantage-of-Cloud-Computing.png
  1. High availability - your files are always available across multiple systems
  2. Fault tolerant - automatic backups enable recovery from failure
  3. Scalability and Elasticity - easily scale compute resources to fit new requirements within minutes

There are various cloud providers, the most popular ones include Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Google (Google Compute Engine) and Microsoft (Azure).

Common use-cases

  1. Web hosting
  2. Storage
  3. Software as a Service
  4. Big Data Analytics
  5. Test and Development