Cloud computing is not unfamiliar to us. In fact, it has penetrated every aspect of our lives: online shopping, transportation, online learning, and so on.
This article describes the definition of cloud computing, its classification, development history, advantages, and problems to be solved.
Definition of cloud computing
Analogical definition
For the definition of cloud computing, I believe that many people have heard of the image of tap water to make analogies: cloud computing is a network that provides resources. With on-demand access, the user can always access the “cloud” on resources like water and electricity. This is a simple and easy-to-understand understanding of “cloud computing.”
Normative definition
As for the standardized definition of cloud computing, the more popular ones include:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as a pay-per-use model that provides available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (resources include networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned with little administrative effort or interaction with service providers. These resources can be quickly provisioned with little management effort or interaction with the service provider.
Baidu Encyclopedia definition: cloud computing (cloud computing) is a kind of distributed computing that refers to the network “cloud” will be huge data computing processing program broken down into countless small programs, and then, through the multiple servers composed of the system to process and analyze these small programs to get the results and return to the user. At this stage, the cloud service is not only a distributed computing but also distributed computing, utility computing, load balancing, parallel computing, network storage, hot backup redundancy virtualization, and other computer technology mixed evolution and the result of the leap.
The definition given by NIST is “cloud computing” and “cloud computing services” (or cloud services) between the two equals. In the Baidu encyclopedia’s explanation, the beginning is “cloud computing. The Baidu encyclopedia explains that “cloud computing” is initially regarded as a kind of technology, while the later explanation mentions the words “cloud service”.
The three words “cloud computing” are not precise; a more accurate expression can be “cloud computing technology” or “cloud computing services.” If we go to the websites of different cloud vendors, we can see that they are not the same.
If we go to the official websites of different cloud vendors to check their introductions of “cloud computing,” they are more like descriptions and definitions of “cloud computing services.” Therefore, nowadays, “cloud computing” is usually preferred to be understood as “cloud computing services.”
In the following pages, the terms cloud computing, cloud computing services, and cloud services have the same meaning.
Classification of cloud computing
The classification of cloud computing generally includes the following:
Classification by deployment form
In terms of deployment form, it can be categorized into public, private, hybrid, etc.
- Public cloud: cloud services provided by third-party providers. Users do not need to purchase their own IT resources and only pay for the resources they use; elasticity and pay-as-you-go are its characteristics.
- Private cloud: Cloud services are built for individual use by an enterprise, owned and operated by a single company, or hosted at a third-party service provider; exclusive and private are its characteristics.
- Hybrid Cloud: A mix of public and private clouds.
Classification by application industry
The application industry can be divided into government cloud, financial cloud, medical cloud, and education cloud.
Classification by service type
The service type can be divided into IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Recently, DaaS and other newly defined forms of cloud computing services have also emerged.
- IaaS category: Infrastructure as a Service is one of the basic forms of cloud computing services. It refers to cloud vendors providing virtualized computing resources to individuals or organizations.
- PaaS: Platform as a Service provides on-demand development environments for developing, testing, and managing software applications and provides a platform for developers to build applications and services over the global Internet.
- SaaS: Software-as-a-Service is a hosted and managed software application provided by a cloud vendor that allows its users to connect to the application and access it over the global Internet.SaaS cloud computing services are the closest cloud computing services to the average user, helping the user solve a specific problem or realize a specific function.
The three types of cloud computing services, from IaaS to SaaS, are gradually increasing in terms of their ” granularity,” i.e., they are getting finer and finer.
The Evolution of cloud computing
Cloud computing has penetrated all walks of life, and our daily lives have become closely related. Travel, group buying, video games, e-commerce shopping, and other life scenes behind are inseparable from cloud computing. Cloud computing quietly enters and changes our lives, but in fact, cloud computing is very “young.” It was born in 2006 and is now only 18 years old.
Big events in the history of cloud computing include:
2006.3.14
Amazon AWS released Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and started to provide IT infrastructure services (IaaS type) to enterprises in the form of Web services, which created a new computing resource service model. There was no name of “cloud computing” at that time. The name “cloud computing” did not exist at that time.
2006.8.9
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, first put forward the concept of “Cloud Computing” (Cloud Computing) at the Search Engine Conference, which was the first time in the development of cloud computing to formally put forward this concept, which is of great significance.
2008.4.7
Google released Google App Engine, which allows users to build Web applications locally using Google’s infrastructure and access cloud computing services in the form of PaaS.
2008.4
Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2 and the virtualization product Hyper-V. So far, the early three major cloud computing vendors have been in the deployment.
2009.9
Aliyun was established, with Dr. Wang Jian as president, and the domestic cloud computing market began to take off.
2010.5.10
AliCloud launched the first commercialized elastic computing product, ECS1.0, and started to provide services for SMB webmasters.
2013.6
AliCloud passed the 5K test and became the first company in the world to provide a 5K cloud.
2015
AliCloud carries out the first virtualization architecture upgrade, upgrading from the Xen architecture to the new KVM architecture, significantly reducing virtualization loss.
2017
AliCloud released the software-hardware integrated Shenlong architecture and conducted the second virtualization architecture upgrade, with virtualization loss reduced to zero.
In the same year, AWS released the specification of C5 instances based on the Nitro architecture, and cloud computing began to enter a new phase of virtualization architecture combining soft and hard.
2020
AliCloud released a one-cloud multi-mode strategy, launched new products such as intelligent complete hosting and cloud box, and continuously extended the public cloud to the outside.
2021
AliCloud releases the fourth-generation Shenlong architecture and upgrades to the new eRDMA network architecture with network latency as low as 5 microseconds, the industry’s first large-scale elastic RDMA acceleration capability.
Problems to be solved by cloud computing
What kind of problem does cloud computing solve, or what type of value does it provide that makes it so important?
To answer this question, it is crucial to mention Amazon’s AWS, which provides the earliest cloud computing services recognized in the industry.
Amazon deployed many IT resources, such as computing and storage, to support the vast number of user visits and shopping transactions. However, after the significant promotion node, the business traffic returns to its natural state, and the deployed IT resources are idle most of the time. To fully utilize these idle IT resources, Amazon began to provide performance computing and storage rental services, which is the initial model of cloud computing services.
First, cloud computing solved the problem of idle IT resources for cloud vendors and their users—cloud service “tenants”—by helping them obtain IT resources at a lower cost and with higher flexibility.
Subsequently, this new service form of cloud computing has been successfully verified as a sustainable and profitable business model. All major cloud vendors consciously and systematically carry out data center construction, availability zone expansion, and server cluster deployment to better provide users with cloud services and products.
On the surface, cloud vendors are centralizing IT resources and then “renting” them out to the public. In fact, cloud vendors are centralizing IT resources and then providing “rental” services, which solves the problem of “low utilization of IT resources” in society as a whole.
Therefore, cloud computing consistently addresses the problem of low resource utilization by renting and sharing IT resources. It improves resource utilization, thus providing more computing power to society at a lower cost.
Advantages of cloud computing
Highly Flexible
Due to the architecture of cloud computing, organizations, and their users can access cloud services anytime, anywhere via an Internet connection and expand and contract services as needed.
Outstanding efficiency
Organizations can quickly develop and deploy new applications into production environments without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Strategic value
Because cloud service providers can keep abreast of the latest innovations and deliver them as a service to their customers, organizations can gain a competitive advantage and a higher return on investment than investing in soon-to-be obsolete technologies.
Security
Organizations often ask what security risks are associated with cloud computing. It is recognized that such risks are low for cloud computing. Cloud providers are usually considered more robust than enterprise data centers due to the depth and breadth of security mechanisms employed by cloud providers. In addition, the cloud provider’s security team is among the top experts in the field.
Affordability
Organizations only pay for their computing resources regardless of the cloud computing service model. They don’t need to over-provision data center resources in response to spikes in demand or business growth and can deploy IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Conclusion
Cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, and quantum communications could be the future of the information age.
The iron triangle of cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things is considered the cornerstone of the industrial Internet at this stage, and the vast majority of industries and fields have demand for these three pieces. With the growing maturity of cloud computing, cloud computing is like water and electricity as a natural thing and can be deeply applied to various fields.
In some sense, we have stood at the turning point of the era of change. Cloud computing carries the mission of the times: to meet the 5G era of the Internet of everything under the star ocean.
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