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Cloud burst

CLOUD, BIG DATA & ANALYTICS are the buzz worlds in today's tech world.  But I clearly feel & see that cloud computing is definitely the game changer in today's IT world

The reason I feel this way is due to the fact that everything is now getting distributed. With so many distributed softwares & platforms around us, cloud computing is enabling us to realise all our needs with easy accessibility to various resources. Resources like cpu, RAM & storage.

First what is cloud computing? There are many definitions out there & many which I have read but for me, cloud computing is the ability to provide accessibility, scalability, self provisioning & adaptability to the end users.

I would like to clearly explain what I mean by each of the above points that I quoted

Accessibility: by this I mean that all the services which the underlying infrastructure is providing, should be accessible by users equally. Various infra services like compute, network, storage which get covered under Infrastructure as a Services. Database, web services, frameworks which get covered under Platform as a Services. All these being provided as services to users must be easily accessible by all. 

Adaptability: While services are accessible, the cloud computing framework or platform should be easily adaptable. It is important that the users understand how they can take advantage of these services & how they can provision the required platforms or infra as needed for their needs.

Scalability: A system can be scaled in two ways. Scaling up means adding additional resources to existing system. Scale out means adding more systems or computes to scale it out horizontally. This is a very important factor due to distributed nature of various platforms currently. And this factor plays a major role in adapting the cloud platform into the organisation. Here we also talk about elastic scalability. What this means is that the cloud platform is able to add extra resources to the existing systems without any impact. 

Self provisioning: This is again an important factor when it comes to cloud computing. The users must be able to provision the services they are looking for on their own rather than depending on the infrastructure teams. 

Does cloud computing mean that we provide all users everything that they need without charging them? Does we really need to care about this? Yes while it is important that we enable the users, it is also important to keep some governance in place in order to ensure that the cloud services are properly distributed among all users as per the business needs.

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