running business on the cloud

If you want to sell something, the most important thing you should focus on is the business model. And if you want to sell your products or services online, you need a web portal that supports a business process that goes from taking requests, delivering products, and collecting payments. Twenty years ago a technical team would have to be formed to manage all the computer infrastructure. However, this is no longer the case.

With cloud computing, you only need to subscribe to a service provider to get the hardware and operating system that your software requires. This lets you focus on the core business problem and not worry about the computer infrastructure that will be in the datacenter in your country or anywhere else. And the pricing for this mix of hardware product and service is based on how long the computer is used, the type of hardware and how much data is stored, etc. In other words, cloud computing brings the utility model to computer infrastructure: like electricity, we pay only for what we use. The cloud computing business had a $370 billion valuation in 2020 and shows how important cloud computing is to any business that uses the software. About 50% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud.

the technology behind the cloud

Two important technologies are at the heart of cloud computing: “virtualization” which allows computer resources to be shared across multiple virtual machines; and the “network” that allows data requests to flow through the Internet to and from a datacenter or cloud. It needs to be noted that resource sharing and utility computing have existed in some form or the other for many years. A good example is the IBM mainframe that accepts job requests and allocates computing resources. But the difference with cloud computing is that the hardware resources are distributed across multiple locations and there are diverse options of software available to the consumers. Mainframes were generally high powered computers but cloud computing provides more computing power with commodity hardware and more options for pre-installed software as per our demand.

This model of utility computing is called pay-as-you-go and is the same principle behind software as a service (SaaS). With SaaS, a software user is charged based on the number of transactions performed by a customer and the volume of those transactions, rather than a flat fee. An example is Google Photos where a customer pays based on the gigabytes required to store the photo. Other popular examples are the Zoho application and the Google application. The SaaS model is now present in a variety of complex businesses. Even cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, operate on the principle of SaaS, but because they offer infrastructure, they are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), if we consider the minimum Order hardware with software, or Platform as a Service (PaaS) if we order hardware with more than the minimum software installed on it.

development of cloud computing

When software is built and run on the “cloud”, response times will vary depending on where the server (i.e., computer infrastructure) is located. To provide quick response especially when customers are present in multiple geographies (think Google or Amazon or IRCTC), it makes sense to host the cloud in multiple locations. This is called edge computing. By “cloud” we refer to the same datacenter and network circuits used by many customers, possibly including our commercial competitors. It is also called “public cloud”. The opposite is the “private cloud” where the geographically distributed hardware is virtually locked in such a way that computing resources are allocated to only one customer. A recent trend is to manage data security issues by using hybrid clouds: extremely important, private information is stored in the private cloud while less important data is stored in the public cloud.

recent trends

Cloud computing opens up unlimited computing resources and in order to make full use of these resources, there is a need to adopt new software development paradigms. For example, a recent trend known as “cloud native development” is developing software that runs on multiple parallel threads or can automatically request additional servers when demand is high and when demand is low. The server may shut down.

Automation software such as Terraform is used to automate launching new servers, managing them, running software in them, powering them down, etc. These are called infrastructure-as-a-service software. Many solutions are built around infrastructure – fail over back-up, spawning new virtual machines called containers and ensuring high availability etc. All these solutions fall under the umbrella called DevOps (Development and Operations).

When the potential of cloud computing is harnessed well, anyone can rapidly launch rich features and bring customers to cloud nine.