We have been covering Cloud Computing for the last week and a half on Microreviews and we know there is a lot more we need to cover. Our Journey started with the definition and has continued to cover much more. So, today we are going to cover the basic features which make Cloud Computing stand out as a platform. There are the pros and the cons but that will all come in future posts. Today, we are just going to cover the features of Cloud Computing.
- Consumption based billing : Pay per use seems to be the winning characteristic for cloud. You pay for the time you use the infrastructure for. You don’t use the resource and you pay nothing. There are providers like Amazon who do provide plans where the billing pulse reduces as you move more towards the 1 year and 3 year fixed plans, but the basic idea is to make the customer pay for only as much as he uses. This is a major help for the small startups which don’t have the money to buy a dedicated server but need huge computing resources for test runs.
- Rapid Elasticity : Consumers can increase or decrease the capacity within a matter of minutes. This can be by adding instances in cases of EC2 or by just increasing memory in some other cases.
- Self Service Based Model: Users have the ability to upload, build, deploy, schedule, manage, and report on their business services on demand. This sort of empowerment and flexibility helps the user work with agility.
- Location and Device Independence: Users can access the server through the internet from any place and from any device including the iPhone and Androids.
Source: blog.twilio.com
- Multi-tenancy : There is no need for additional resources like real estate, electricity etc for the servers. The resources can be shared among a number of users in such a way that when one requires high resources and other low, they get shared in a way that each one gets the amount it needs. Also, Utilization and Efficiency are much higher. There can be times when you need not switch on your server and hence are able to utilize your resource better.
- Reliability: Reliability is improved by having multiple sites for the same service, such that if one faces an outage, the other can take over the load for the time being.
- Ease of Maintenance :Since, the applications don’t need to be deployed on every person’s computer, maintenance of such a centralized application becomes much easier.
These were some of the basic characteristics of Cloud Computing. There can be many more and we can carry on forever. I could have put stuff like Load Balancing etc. but they are are not implied along with Cloud Computing. Let me know if I am missing any of the prime feature.
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