Cloud Computing has taken over the internet, and Every organization is switching its IT infrastructure to the cloud. But what's the reason behind this migration, and what are the benefits and downsides of cloud computing. let's see it in detail.
Before looking into cloud computing let's see the traditional methods from which the cloud came into the picture then understanding the benefits will be a lot easier.
what are the types of computing?
First of all, what does computing mean?. There are many services over the internet in different broad range categories and a lot of data is generated and needs to be processed. The usage of computer technology to process this data and gain necessary insights is called Computing. Let's see in detail how computing has evolved over the years.
Mainframe Computing.
The first-ever computing architecture is Mainframe computing, they are mighty and can process lots of data. These are the first-generation computing devices during the evolution of computers. They are very expensive and can take a lot of space to fit in. Every organization couldn't afford this type of technology it was only limited to a few people.
Cluster Computing.
To solve the issues of Mainframe computing, Cluster computing was introduced, here the computers or devices are arranged in the form of a cluster, and each of them is connected with a high bandwidth connection to provide low latency communications. In this type of architecture, new clusters or nodes can be easily added and the performance of the whole architecture can be increased more easily than Mainframe computing. But still, they are limited to a geographical location, and cannot be accessible from everywhere.
Grid Computing.
As the concept of nodes was introduced in cluster computing, in this architecture it was taken to a next level by distributing the nodes or clusters across geographical locations and they are all connected via the Internet. But as they are using the Internet a good bandwidth connection needs to be established across different regions of the world. This node can consist of individual resources or organization-specific nodes. The concept of cloud computing is also inspired by Grid computing.
Cloud Computing.
It refers to the on-demand delivery of IT services and resources on a pay-as-you-use basis. The usage of virtualization made this possible to use the hardware in a wide variety of use cases. Many operations like storing, processing, and monitoring which are done on-premises datacenter can be carried out by cloud computing.
Advantages of Cloud Computing.
- Zero Maintainese: It takes a lot of effort to maintain the IT resources like cooling, installing, and changing, all this will be taken by the service provider and we are only concerned about the services and development of the application. Instead of wasting money setting up the infrastructure, we can directly focus on the development
- Cost Management: In most cases after setting up the infrastructure, they will be idle without any request to them, which indeed is a loss of the resource cost and we cannot afford this loss. In cloud computing, all the services are billed based on the time or processing power that we are using. We only pay for the no of secs the service is active which can reduce a lot of costs on the infrastructure.
- Scalability and Elasticity: The request to a service is not constant over the days, during weekdays the traffic will be a lot less than compared to weekends, But if we don't have enough servers to maintain the traffic we will be losing whole customers, and seeing the other side, if we are having excess servers and there is no traffic all of them will be idle which is both ways wastage of resources and loss of the customer. In cloud computing, we can elastically scale up by deploying new instances or scale down by terminating the resources which indeed will save a lot of costs and retain the customers and traffic.
- High Performance and Fault Tolerant: As all the instances are maintained for a specific service we will be getting a better performance than traditional computing. In case of any errors, the infrastructure will automatically start new instances to provide zero downtime for the customers.
- Wide Range Of Services: In cloud Computing, everything is offered as a service, and the no of services offered by cloud service providers is very high, They are distributed based on the types of computing you want to do. Moreover, CSPs like AWS, Azure, and GCP have services for every common difficulty we face in traditional computing.
- Availability and Latency.: As it says on-demand delivery, These resources can be accessed from anywhere in the world with simple credentials and can perform operations on it. The data centers of CSP are located in every popular state of the world to provide the lowest latency possible. And the no of data centers is also increasing day by day.
Disadvantages of Cloud Computing
- Data Security and Privacy: We are giving our organizational data on a third-party infrastructure, which most industry standards don't recommend. Even tho Cloud service provider has many services to protect their user data from external attacks and malware there's always a doubt about it. So most cases the whole infrastructure is not migrated to the cloud and confidential data is processed in traditional data centers only.
- Legacy Infrastructure: If we take a few companies they might have legacy systems that are hard to integrate with the cloud services and need to be managed separately which takes a lot of effort and maintenance issues.
- Interoperability and Flexibility: Once we start thinking to migrate to the cloud there are a lot of tasks required, we need to change the whole architecture concerning the cloud, and small mistakes can also lead to vulnerabilities. Even Switching from one cloud to another is also a tedious task.
- Finding the Right Services: Every deployment is done using services and finding the right service of use can be hard sometimes as they are a wide variety of them. And moreover, it is also dependent on the geographical location, Few services might not be available in a few locations, and care needs to be taken while choosing them.
- Lack of Knowledge and Expertise: They are very few People who have good knowledge about how cloud computing works, and without knowing this migration can be hard. Even though developers are getting aware of cloud computing there is a lot of vacancy in this field.