You and your friends have recently graduated from college
and have a great idea for a start-up. Excited about a potential rags-to-riches
scenario, you start to think about what you need. You probably cannot run
everything from your desktop computer so you are going to need the backbone of
all networking startups: a datacenter. This datacenter will serve as your
office space, power, storage, servers, etc. Now to keep your datacenter
running, you will need a stack of the most up-to-date software plus an IT team
to take care of your datacenter. By the time you finished setting everything
up, you have already invested large amounts of money without touching your
start-up idea. Enter cloud computing.
Cloud computing is another way of running a business.
Instead of running your applications yourself, your business will be running on
a shared datacenter. Think of cloud computing as a model where anyone anywhere
has on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources; these
resources can be anything ranging from servers to applications to services. Chances
are that you have already used cloud computing: Gmail. When you try to access
your email, you do not need a server or database to store your emails nor do
you need an IT team. Google takes care of all these issues while users only
need a username and password to instantly access their emails.
So why cloud computing? One of its biggest traits is
scalability; as companies such as Reddit rapidly grow in size, borrowing dynamic
resources from the cloud is much easier than physically buying more infrastructures.
Unlike the old days, businesses can be upgraded and up and running in a few
days. Likewise, costs are less because companies do not need to pay for the
facilities or people to maintain their virtual servers. Instead, they only pay
for what they use (think water utility).
As cloud computing becomes more reliable and feasible, we
are starting to see a trend from the traditional network to a “cloud” network.
This new network can grow and shrink based on consumption needs and accommodate
rapidly changing businesses. Sharing information technology is already
well-established in society, especially among research institutes, and many
feel this could take that level of collaboration to the next level.
Already, companies such as Microsoft and Amazon have devoted
mass datacenters to provide commercial cloud services to organizations. As more
and more businesses depend on the same cloud services, our network will become more and more
closely connected.
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