What is Cloud?

Cloud Computing is being adopted by more businesses as budgets are smaller this year than last year. Cloud is a way for a business to only pay for what they are using. I often get the question when I teach of what is cloud. I respond that cloud can be different depending on who is asking the question. For example if a System Administrator is asking the cloud might be Amazon EC2. If a Software Engineer is asking it may be Microsoft Azure. If the Chief Executive Officer is asking it maybe Salesforce.com. If the Chief financial Officer is asking cloud could be the difference between a capital expense and an operating expense. This all means that cloud is a way to remotely provision scalable IT resources throughout an organization abstracting the details of the implementation with a layered approach.

Cloud computing can be categorized in three deployment models. IAAS( Infrastructure as a Service), PAAS(Platform as a Service) and SAAS(Software as a Service). We will address each these in more detail in future posts.