Cloud computing has become the ideal way to deliver enterprise applications—and the preferred solution for companies extending their infrastructure or launching new innovations.
Cloud computing is an abstraction of compute, storage, and network infrastructure assembled as a platform on which applications and systems can be deployed quickly and scaled on the fly.
Crucial to cloud computing is self-service: Users can simply fill in a web form and get up and running. The vast majority of cloud customers consume public cloud computing services over the internet, which are hosted in large, remote data centers maintained by cloud providers.
The most common type of cloud computing, SaaS (software as service), delivers prebuilt applications to the browsers of customers who pay per seat or by usage, Next in line is IaaS (infrastructure as a service), which offers vast, virtualized compute, storage, and network infrastructure upon which customers build their own applications, often with the aid of providers’ API-accessible services.
All three have become gargantuan ecosystems of services that go way beyond infrastructure: developer tools, serverless computing, machine learning services and APIs, data warehouses, and thousands of other services. With both SaaS and IaaS, a key benefit is agility. Customers gain new capabilities almost instantly without capital investment in hardware or software—and they can instantly scale the cloud resources they consume up or down as needed.
A typical example of cloud computing is Plucom Web Services. It offers SaaS by providing his customers with variery of applications and web services to be use in business management ecosystem.
Benefis of cloud computing
The cloud’s main appeal is to reduce the time to market of applications that need to scale dynamically. Increasingly, however, developers are drawn to the cloud by the abundance of advanced new services that can be incorporated into applications, from machine learning to internet of things (IoT) connectivity.
Although businesses sometimes migrate legacy applications to the cloud to reduce data center resource requirements, the real benefits accrue to new applications that take advantage of cloud services and “cloud native” attributes. The latter include microservices architecture, Linux containers to enhance application portability, and container management solutions such as Kubernetes that orchestrate container-based services.
Cloud-native approaches and solutions can be part of either public or private clouds and help enable highly efficient devops-style workflows. Cloud computing, public or private or hybrid or multicloud, has become the platform of choice for large applications, particularly customer-facing ones that need to change frequently or scale dynamically.
More significantly, the major public clouds now lead the way in enterprise technology development, debuting new advances before they appear anywhere else. Workload by workload, enterprises are opting for the cloud, where an endless parade of exciting new technologies invite innovative use.
SaaS has its roots in the ASP (application service provider) trend of the early 2000s, when providers would run applications for business customers in the provider’s data center, with dedicated instances for each customer.
The ASP model was a spectacular failure because it quickly became impossible for providers to maintain so many separate instances, particularly as customers demanded customizations and updates.
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