What is cloud computing with example

 What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers (physical servers and virtual servers), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more—hosted at a remote data center managed by a cloud services provider (or CSP). The CSP makes these resources available for a monthly subscription fee or bills them according to usage.

Compared to traditional on-premises IT, and depending on the cloud services you select, cloud computing helps do the following:

• Lower IT costs: Cloud lets you offload some or most of the costs and effort of purchasing, installing, configuring, and managing your own on-premises infrastructure. 
• Improve agility and time-to-value: With cloud, your organization can start using enterprise applications in minutes, instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, purchase and configure supporting hardware, and install software. Cloud also lets you empower certain users—specifically developers and data scientists—to help themselves to software and support infrastructure.
• Scale more easily and cost-effectively: Cloud provides elasticity—instead of purchasing excess capacity that sits unused during slow periods, you can scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in traffic. You can also take advantage of your cloud provider’s global network to spread your applications closer to users around the world.

The term ‘cloud computing’ also refers to the technology that makes cloud work. This includes some form of virtualized IT infrastructure—servers, operating system software, networking, and other infrastructure that’s abstracted, using special software, so that it can be pooled and divided irrespective of physical hardware boundaries. For example, a single hardware server can be divided into multiple virtual servers.

Virtualization enables cloud providers to make maximum use of their data center resources. Not surprisingly, many corporations have adopted the cloud delivery model for their on-premises infrastructure so they can realize maximum utilization and cost savings vs. traditional IT infrastructure and offer the same self-service and agility to their end-users.

If you use a computer or mobile device at home or at work, you almost certainly use some form of cloud computing every day, whether it’s a cloud application like Google Gmail or Salesforce, streaming media like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox. According to a recent survey, 92% of organizations use cloud today (link resides outside IBM), and most of them plan to use it more within the next year.

Types of cloud computing

Public cloud

Public cloud is a type of cloud computing in which a cloud service provider makes computing resources—anything from SaaS applications, to individual virtual machines (VMs), to bare metal computing hardware, to complete enterprise-grade infrastructures and development platforms—available to users over the public internet. These resources might be accessible for free, or access might be sold according to subscription-based or pay-per-usage pricing models.

The public cloud provider owns, manages, and assumes all responsibility for the data centers, hardware, and infrastructure on which its customers’ workloads run, and it typically provides high-bandwidth network connectivity to ensure high performance and rapid access to applications and data. 

Public cloud is a multi-tenant environment—the cloud provider's data center infrastructure is shared by all public cloud customers. In the leading public clouds—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud—those customers can number in the millions.

The global market for public cloud computing has grown rapidly over the past few years, and analysts forecast that this trend will continue; industry analyst Gartner predicts that worldwide public cloud revenues will exceed USD 330 billion by the end of 2022 (link resides outside IBM).

Many enterprises are moving portions of their computing infrastructure to the public cloud because public cloud services are elastic and readily scalable, flexibly adjusting to meet changing workload demands. Others are attracted by the promise of greater efficiency and fewer wasted resources since customers pay only for what they use. Still others seek to reduce spending on hardware and on-premises infrastructures.

Learn more about public cloud

Private cloud

Private cloud is a cloud environment in which all cloud infrastructure and computing resources are dedicated to, and accessible by, one customer only. Private cloud combines many of the benefits of cloud computing—including elasticity, scalability, and ease of service delivery—with the access control, security, and resource customization of on-premises infrastructure.

A private cloud is typically hosted on-premises in the customer's data center. But a private cloud can also be hosted on an independent cloud provider’s infrastructure or built on rented infrastructure housed in an offsite data center.

Many companies choose private cloud over public cloud because private cloud is an easier way (or the only way) to meet their regulatory compliance requirements. Others choose private cloud because their workloads deal with confidential documents, intellectual property, personally identifiable information (PII), medical records, financial data, or other sensitive data.

By building private cloud architecture according to cloud native principles, an organization gives itself the flexibility to easily move workloads to public cloud or run them within a hybrid cloud (see below) environment whenever they’re ready.

Learn more about private cloud

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud is just what it sounds like—a combination of public and private cloud environments. Specifically, and ideally, a hybrid cloud connects an organization's private cloud services and public clouds into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads.

The goal of hybrid cloud is to establish a mix of public and private cloud resources—and with a level of orchestration between them—that gives an organization the flexibility to choose the optimal cloud for each application or workload and to move workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change. This enables the organization to meet its technical and business objectives more effectively and cost-efficiently than it could with public or private cloud alone.

Private cloud and IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud Paks make it faster, simpler, and more secure to move existing applications to any cloud environment, whether it's public or private. Each IBM Cloud Pak includes containerized middleware, common software development and management services, and a common integration layer, enabling development teams to orchestrate their production topology. This makes it easy to modernize existing applications for Kubernetes using agile DevOps methodologies. IBM Cloud Paks simplify the process of migrating your full software stack to any environment—on-premises, the public cloud, or private and hybrid cloud architectures.

With IBM Cloud Satellite, you can build and run applications with faster time to market, scalability and reliability to enable workload and data portability. Satellite provides a consistent, fully managed set of core application services that run across cloud environments including private and public clouds and on-premises. This offering means you can quickly take advantage of core artificial intelligence, data, and Kubernetes services that easily integrate into your existing operations.

To learn more about how IBM Cloud can help you build secure, reliable, and high-performing cloud infrastructures—whether they’re publ