Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with primarily pay-as-you-go pricing. With cloud computing, companies do not have to manage and maintain their own hardware and data centers. Instead, companies like AWS own and maintain data centers and provide virtual data center technologies and services to companies and users over the internet.
AWS provides cloud computing services. The IT resources mentioned in the cloud computing definition are AWS services.
Instead of investing in data centers and hardware before you know how you are going to use them, you pay only when you use computing resources, and pay only for how much you use.
By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, AWS can ahieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay as-you-go prices.
Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often end up either stting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes notice.
IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make resources available to your developers from weeks to minutes. This results in a dramatic increse in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.
Companies can focus on projects that differentiate their business instead of maintaining data centes. Cloud computing lets you focus on your customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering physical infrastructure. This is oten referred to as undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Applications can be deployed in multiple Regions around the world with a few clicks. This means that you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at a minimal cost.
The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them — from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more.
With Cloud Computing, you don't have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly grow and shrink capacity as your business needs changes.
The Cloud allows you to trade fixed expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.
With the Cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For example, AWS has infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.
IaaS contains basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computiers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources.It is most similar to the existing IT resource with which many IT departments and developers are familiar.
PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems), and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you more efficient as you don't need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.
SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software.
A cloud-based application is fully deployed in the cloud and all parts of the application run in the cloud. Applications in the cloud have either been created or have been migrated from an existing infrastructure to take advantange of the benefits of cloud computing. Cloud-based applications can be built on low-level infrastructure pieces or can use higher level services that provide abstraction from the management, architecting and scaling requirements of core infrastructure.
A hybrid deployment is a way to connect infrastructure and applications between cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud. The most common method of hybrid deployment is between the cloud and existing on-premises infrastructure to extend, and grow, an organization's infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to the internal system.
The deployment of resources on-premises, using virtualization and resource management tools, is sometimes called the “private cloud.” On-premises deployment doesn’t provide many of the benefits of cloud computing but is sometimes sought for its ability to provide dedicated resources. In most cases this deployment model is the same as legacy IT infrastructure while using application management and virtualization technologies to try and increase resource utilization.