Craftworking

What is the Cloud?

Many people have asked me about cloud. What is it, why is it and what can it do for me. When I ask the experts about what the cloud is, I get a wide variety of answers. So like a lot of you, I did some research.

The short answer is, it's leased computing and computers. Look at it this way. When you lease a car, you don't own the car. You pay monthly and drive it. You never own the car. The leasing company, usually the car dealer takes care of all the scheduled maintenence and repairs. All you have to do is put gas in it and replace the tires once in a while. The same now goes for computers and more often computing. In cloud computing, you sign up with a cloud provider like Amazon and "build" your computer. Amazon will provision their computer on their premice and give you remote access to it. You pay a monthly fee for this. All maintenence, upgrades, and service is done by Amazon. From a users point of view, its exactly the same as if it were right in front of you.

But what is the cloud? The word cloud doesn't have much to do about someone else owning and maintaining my windows 8 computer.

The cloud is acually a datacenter. A datacenter is a building with a bunch of computers, usually several thousand. When you sign up with a cloud provider, they take one or more of these computer and load whatever you order on it. Then they set it up so you can get to it remotely with a remote desktop program or other access applications.

Lets look at the pactical benefits. Usually consumers don't know or want to know what goes on inside a computer. All that they want to do is use it. So why do I need to have a computer sitting at my home when I get the same thing from a cloud provider? Now the consumer doesn't have to go out to the computer store and try to figure out what to buy.

Another benefit to your computer being in the cloud is the flexibility to grow. If you run out of disk space for example, all that is needed to to log into you account and buy more disk space. The cloud provider will add disk space within a few seconds and there is no interruption in service. If you had to expand you PC at home, you would have to go buy another disk and install it yourself or have the Geek squad do it for you. Either way you will have to shut down your PC.

Great, but how does this all Work? In the datacenter, the computers are real powerhouses of equipment. Most of these computers have way more computing power than what the average consumer will ever need. Plus these computer cost many 10 of thousands of dollars. It is impactical for a cloud provider to assign a single computer to you. If they did they would have to charge you thousand of dollars a month. The main technology that is used in the cloud is called virtualization. What this allows the provider to do is to put multiple operating systems on a single compter. This brings the price down to where most people can afford it.

There several options with cloud. We are most familiar with cloud storage such as Apple's iCloud. You are only buying harddrive space. Your home PC, table, or smartphone is connected via the internet and connects to the cloud prviders disk drives. You used the cloud hard drive just as you do a hard drive on your home PC. An application on you device does the connection and data transfer. Another example is Adobe CC. This is called software as a service or SaaS. Here you are buying the application and not an entire computer. When you buy a computer from a cloud provider, its call Platform as a service or PaaS. There is even something called Infrastructer as a service, IaaS. What this give you is an entire network of computers.

The security of the cloud is always a question. If the cloud is publically accessible, then how is my data kept secure? Lets look at this from the average user. The average user has absolutely no clue on whats going on with cyber attacks. Very little if anything is done about securing the home PC. Maybe a virus program and a simple window firewall is the only protection. However the cloud providers are much better at securing your data. They employ a lot of experts dedicated to securing the customers data. They have enterprise grade firewalls to protect your data.

There are some disadvatages to cloud computing. The first is that its not there in front of you. Speed may become an issue if your internet connection is poor. Which brings me to the internet connection. You are dependent on that connection. If your internet connection goes down, you lost the ability to use the service. Another disadvantage is cost. Eventually you wiil pay enough monthly fees that it will cost more than buying a PC outright. You have to weigh these considerations when thinking about moving to the cloud.

Cloud is just a word. What is means is an alternative to the way we do computing. The difference is that your computer is now located somewhere else and is owned and operated by someone else. For you the user there is really no differece in it's use. Do you really care that when opening up Microsoft Word that is it running on a computer somewhere else?