Cloud computing is sweeping across all major spheres of human society: government agencies-to small enterprises - to corporations to NGOs. It perplexes any active mind to wonder what is so unique about cloud computing that makes it such a compelling proposition. The answer lies in the following four capabilities offered by cloud computing.
Elasticity: This is the most striking attribute of cloud computing. It is also the fundamental one. Elasticity enables a cloud consumer (user) to start running their application on just a single server. However in no time, cloud-computing enables the use to scale up her application to run on 10’s or 100’s or even 1000’s of servers.
Example:Animoto saw its load double every 12 hours for nearly three days.
What is more, cloud also makes it possible to scale-down to lesser number of servers 100’s or 10’s or even back to one server with out any major problem. All these scaling up and down happen almost instantaneously and users don’t even notice or realize it.. This fundamental property is called elasticity.
Benefits of elasticity
Apparent infinity: The fact that an application can indent and get resources in almost exponential quantities instantly creates an “impression of infinity”. This feature makes a cloud computing offer equally attractive to an entrepreneur who can start with NIL resources and scale to FULL speed or big corporation and business to outsource them in degrees of their choice to meet varying needs of computing resources.
Pay-per-Use or Pay-By-Use:
Pay-per use is a corollary that goes hand in hand with elasticity. Since cloud providers can allow user to scale-up and scale-down the consumption of computing resources- they can also charge their service accordingly. In other words, a user is asked to pay for the “exact” amount for “exact” quantity of service consumed. In other words services are metered
Advantages of Pay by Use
Most of us are used to and feel comfortable with this: autos are metered, electricity, water and even mobile currency is a metered. Pay-By Use is inherently good customer.
Another familiar analogy is that of Cable or DTH or TV subscription. Pay-per use allows customer to available particular channels during select seasons. Entertainment channels during vocations and sports channels during tournaments or world cups etc
Self-Service
The elasticity capability of cloud entails scaling-up and scaling down resource provisions almost instantly. In order to make it more effective and make user herself in control of the process, a console is offered by the cloud service provider. With the help of this console, a user can control resources all by herself without any intermediary. The console allows user to add a new CPU, a server instance or add extra storage in an easy manner. This feature reduces maintenance burden drastically. From a large enterprise perspective, this means reduction in cost of system maintenance by way decreasing or almost eliminating dedicated IT staff.
Programmability
The Cloud computing gives a developer community a new opportunity. The programmability feature of the cloud opens up new development dimension. Developers can now create additional resources and add it to the applications on demand. They can approach entire data centre, servers and infrastructure as an object model that can be programmed. ISV can also leverage cloud resources to develop new scalable applications and offer at market places.
