Let’s get down to business! Today’s post is the PART1 of Cloud Computing. Each and everyone one of us uses cloud computing services everyday of our lives without even knowing about it. So this post is intended to shed light on the basics of cloud computing. Since Cloud Computing is so vast, it will take me more than one post to explain all of its components.

By definition Cloud Computing is defined as ‘a model for enabling ubiquitous network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources’. (I bet u didn’t get a single word of that except for ‘a model’, but don’t worry! Neither did I when I first started reading up on it).

Let’s understand what cloud computing means… The ‘cloud’ in cloud computing refers to set of hardware, networks and storage devices which can be accessed and used for any purpose. Thus a cloud is actually a connected domain of machines (u can understand this as a pool-up of resources). The most important point of this huge interconnected network is that the devices are connected using the internet! So this huge net of resources can be accessed easily.

Let’s try and make it more simple…. Let’s say u own a company. Now, you need to make sure that all of your employees have the proper software setup and that they have all the tools required. This has to be done every time for every new system. A single application on a system can allow each employee to access any program or software hosted on a ‘cloud’ of machines.

This video is a really good one to understand the immense applications that cloud computing can have and why it’s good for new businesses.

So basically, cloud computing helps in shifting any single machine workload by sharing it with a huge number of connected machines.

The capabilities of cloud computing in almost literally endless. You can run entire companies on cloud computing itself. Huge multi-billion dollars companies rely on cloud computing nowadays!

This was just an introduction to the topic, I will be explaining many core concepts involved in cloud computing in the next post and also about the various applications it has in our world!