Cloud Computing and Your Business
Your boss read some magazine article about how “cloud computing” is the next big thing. Now you should understand what that means and how to do it. How can you “take advantage” of this cloud computing trend?
You can engage in cloud computing as a producer or a consumer, or both.
Cloud service provider
It is often said that in a gold rush, the people selling shovels make more money than the people digging for gold.
This is also true when it comes to “the cloud” – people who provide some kind of cloud service are the biggest winners, and the more basic the service, the bigger the prize.
Providing IaaS or PaaS is a bit outside the scope of this guide and most people reading it, but SaaS (Software as a Service) may not.
If you sell software, your application may be able to be reimagined as a SaaS offering.
Instead of providing applications that customers must run on their own computers and servers, you may be able to provide access to the software through a web browser or desktop application connected to the Internet.
Cloud services consumer
When most businesses talk about the benefits of cloud computing, they are talking about the benefits of consuming cloud services (platform or infrastructure) instead of generating conventional computing power themselves.
Traditionally, a company used a desktop project management system that shared data on a local server. They move to an online application where users connect from a web browser. This is Software as a Service (SaaS).
A web application company that provides a SaaS project management application has traditionally hosted the application on their own server. They are moving their application to a “cloud-based” virtual server with a hosting company. This is a Platform as a Service (PaaS).
The hosting company doesn’t actually own data centers but instead purchases raw computing power from Amazon Web Services (Amazon AWS). This is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
All of these can be described as forms of “cloud computing.”
The advantage of each is that you can now pay for something you may have previously had to purchase (at significant capital expense) by using it.
This is especially cost-effective if you don’t need the benefits of a full server, or if you can’t afford the upfront expense.
Cloud storage
What does all this have to do with web hosting?
Many web hosting companies sell some kind of “cloud hosting” plan. This is usually a type of VPS hosting, where the VPS sits on a cloud (a cluster of computers) rather than directly on the server hardware.
Many shared hosting plans work this way, with dozens or hundreds of hosting customers sharing a single VPS, which itself is one of many on a pool of computing resources.
The storage company may or may not own the hardware; they may create their own cloud infrastructure, or consume it as a service from another provider.
The advantage for the customer is that cloud-based hosting (also called “web hosting” by some providers) is inherently scalable. Instead of a single machine with storage, memory, and processor limitations, a virtual machine on a cloud server has no hard physical limitations. An important advantage when it comes to cloud computing and your business.
If activity increases, it can use a larger proportion of the total pool; if the pool becomes overly large, additional hardware can be added to it.
Whether a hosting company bills its offerings as “cloud” or not should not be of concern to you as a web hosting customer.
Most web hosts engage in some form of clustering and virtualization, so in some ways almost any hosting plan could be described as “cloud-based.” The term has meaning, but as a marketing pitch it is almost meaningless.
The article was translated from English to Hebrew.
Written by Adam Michael Wood
