The cloud, one of the most common terms in the modern technology during the recent years. The cloud can be defined as a group servers remotely hosted and ideally provide different functionalities. The servers can be in different locations of each but harmonize to play as common role. Software and databases run on those servers to deliver the required services. Clouds services include software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
Two common deployment methods are Public and Private. A public cloud is usually provided by a service provider, customers share common resources and the service is available over the Internet. In a private cloud servers are hosted in a private data center just for a particular organization. In some cases the servers can be hosted on premises.
With public cloud a customer save costs as they cannot use the exact computing resources required and upgrade as demand grows. This also goes vice-versa where they can downgrade if resource demand goes down. The customer will pay the cloud service provider as per resource used. With the growth of the public cloud, service providers are now offering better latencies as they are able to replicate services in data centers across globe. The main draw backs for using public cloud is data security concerns and been locked in to a particular provider. An organization might be involved in processing sensitive data and hosting it in a publicly accessed cloud is a high concern. In addition, when you start using a public cloud, it might be costly to move to another provider and this inturn locks you to one specific provider. A private cloud addresses these draw backs as the server resources are not shared with other organizations and a private to link is setup to access the cloud hence inaccessible from the Internet.
The public cloud has helped accelerate software and application development as it has made affordable for one to pay for only the computing resources they require. It is a technological advancement that needs to be taken advantage of. Some common public cloud service providers include Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.
