Cloud computing web hosting
What exactly is cloud computing?
The difference between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
What might your technician mean by “going to the cloud”?
What is cloud web hosting and why it doesn’t really matter.
Like many popular words, “the cloud” is as much a marketing buzzword as it is a real concept.
There really is such a thing as “cloud computing,” and many web hosting companies are actively engaged in providing cloud-based services, but the term itself can be a bit misleading, and there isn’t really one cloud that can be called “the cloud.”
Cloud computing is a metaphor—a visual concept for us humans that tries to communicate something that is hard to imagine. What the term tries to communicate is the idea of virtual computing power riding on clustered hardware, organized in such a way that the computing power itself is like a utility, like electricity or water.
The idea is that you can use as much as you need, and pay for as much as you use. Similar to the electricity grid or the water and sewer system, you don’t have to think too much about where your electricity comes from or where your drain water goes – that’s someone else’s job.
What do people mean when they talk about the cloud?
A cloud works like this: a group of computers (servers) are grouped together so that they can function as one giant computer.
Virtual servers are deployed on top of this cluster.
From a marketing and business perspective, “cloud” can mean one of several different things.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This is what happens when a company owns the actual hardware, a pool of clustered servers, and can provide access to virtual machines, virtual drives, and other basic computing resources from the larger pool.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): Someone (who may own the servers, or perhaps need infrastructure as a service from another provider) runs operating systems and network servers on virtual machines and provides them to others for their computing needs. This is what a web hosting company does.
Software as a Service (SaaS): Someone has built an application for others to use, and hosts it on a platform they may own. Dropbox, Google Apps, and other subscription-based web applications are examples of this.
In general, “going to the cloud” or doing something “in the cloud” simply means storing data or running applications on someone else’s clustered equipment. This means that they are consumers of software, platform, or infrastructure as a service.
Sometimes these three layers are owned by the same organization. Often they are not.
The problem with “cloud storage” as a metaphor
It’s easy to start thinking of the cloud as some ethereal mist of computing resources—light, airy, and far above us. The problem with that is that it’s far from the truth. Clouds are made up of physical machines, with physical wires and physical disks.
This has several implications for how we use and consume cloud services, but the biggest issue is security.
If you store data in a “cloud-based” data storage application, who has access to that data? Do you even know where that data is, physically? It could be almost anywhere, including in another country.
A better metaphor might be “bundled” or “clustered,” and it’s even better to say what is actually meant—whether it’s infrastructure, platform, or software as a service.
Cloud storage 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 hosting service provider
It is often said that in a golden age, 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.
Consumer cloud storage services
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.
A web application company that provides a SaaS project management application traditionally hosted the application on their own server. They are moving their application to a cloud-based “virtual private” 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 that you might have previously been required to purchase (at significant capital expense).
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 hosting
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 limit.
If activity increases, it can use a larger percentage 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.
Wikipedia entry – Cloud computing
The article was translated from English to Hebrew.
Written by Adam Michael Wood
