What is the definition of cloud computing?

Our definition of cloud computing is based on five features: multiple leases (sharing resources), massive scalability, resilience, Pay-as-you-go, and provisioning of resources.

Multiple leases (resource sharing) the previous computing model assumes that there is a specific resource (for example, a single user or proprietary computing facility for the owner), cloud computing, unlike this, is based on the business model of sharing resources, such as multiple users using the same resources, at the network level, at the host level, and at the application level.

There may already be hundreds of thousands of systems available for large-scale scalability, and cloud computing provides the ability to scale to tens of thousands of systems, as well as large-scale bandwidth and storage.

Resilient users can quickly add and subtract their computing resources as needed and release resources for other users when they no longer need to compute resources.

Pay-as-you-go users pay only according to the resources and hours they actually use. Self-Configuring resource users to configure their own resources, including additional systems (operational capabilities, software, storage) and network resources.

One of the characteristics of cloud computing is the resilience of resources. This feature allows users to add or subtract their computing resources as needed, as shown in Figure 2-1. While we are always aware of the baseline for computing resources, it is very difficult to predict the future, especially in times of constant change in demand. Cloud computing can provide a solution to supply IT resources on demand to cope with the situation when peak usage occurs.

As cloud computing provides a solution for users to get the power of supercomputers at a very low cost, there is a growing investment in cloud computing. More importantly, cloud computing solutions can be implemented on demand; in cloud computing, the network becomes a supercomputer, and users can buy the computing power they want when they need it. Cloud computing delivers scalable it capabilities to users as a service by using Internet technology.

Figure 2-1: Elasticity Features

Cloud computing has gained a lot of investment from the market, and figure 2-2 depicts a forecast of rapid growth in cloud computing, highlighting current cloud products and trends that are important in the marketplace, and showing the benefits of cloud-based services.

Figure 2-2: Current important cloud computing products on the market (above)

and cloud based service expenditure (below)

Cloud computing is seen as an important driver of the growth of IT spending worldwide. In fact, the composite annual growth rate (CAGR) of cloud computing services is estimated to be 27%, according to IDC, and is expected to close to $42 billion trillion in 2012, compared to a 5% per cent increase in the expected composite annual growth rate for non-cloud services.