How does cloud computing work?

By CIOReview | Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Third-party cloud service providers operate public clouds, which deliver computing resources over the Internet, such as servers and storage

Fremont, CA: A cloud computing service provides servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence through the Internet ("the cloud") to enable faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. By using cloud services, you will be able to reduce operating costs, increase efficiency, and scale up and down as your business needs change.

Types of cloud computing

Cloud computing is not the same for everyone and not all types of cloud computing is appropriate for everyone. A variety of models, types and services have evolved to help you find the right solution.

Identify the type of cloud deployment, or cloud computing architecture, on which your cloud services will be implemented first. Cloud deployment can take place in public clouds, private clouds, or hybrid clouds, which are three ways to deploy cloud services. Find out what public, private, and hybrid clouds are.

Public cloud

Third-party cloud service providers operate public clouds, which deliver computing resources over the Internet, such as servers and storage. A public cloud is Microsoft Azure. Using a cloud provider, all hardware, software, and other supporting infrastructure are owned and managed by them. Using a web browser, you can access these services and manage your account. Public clouds: what they are and how they work.

Private cloud

Private clouds are cloud computing resources that are exclusively used by a single organization or business. It is possible for a private cloud to be physically located at the company's on-site data center. Moreover, some companies pay third-party service providers to host their private clouds. Private clouds are those in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network. Find out more about private clouds.

Hybrid cloud

Technology allows data and applications to be shared between public and private clouds in a hybrid cloud. Hybrid clouds offer greater flexibility, more deployment options, and better infrastructure, security, and compliance by allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds.

IaaS, PaaS, serverless, and SaaS are types of cloud services.

There are four broad categories of cloud computing services: IaaS, PaaS, serverless, and SaaS (software as a service). Since they build on top of one another, they are sometimes called the cloud computing stack. It is important to know what your business goals are and how they differ from each other in order to achieve them.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Services offered by cloud computing at their most basic level. In case you rent IT infrastructure - servers, virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems - on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Platform as a service provides an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. Using PaaS, developers can rapidly develop web or mobile apps without having to worry about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases.