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Types of Cloud Computing

In my earlier post, I explained about cloud? Now I am going to explain about different types of cloud computing and layers of cloud computing.
Based on organization’s business, economy and technical need, we divide Cloud in different category.
Cloud computing is define in three major technology layers. These are SAAS (Software As A service), PAAS (Platform As A Service) and IASS (Infrastructure As A Service).

        1. SAAS (Software As A Service) – This is the top technology layer of Cloud Computing and oldest among these three. Under this layer organization gets fully functional applications on-demand to provide specific services such as email management, CRM, ERP, web conferencing and an increasingly wide range of other applications. These software licenses are managed by Cloud computing company.
      2. PAAS (Platform As A Service) – Second layer of cloud computing is PAAS (Platform As A Service). In this layer organization gets mostly an operating environment to develop application, to run application or to deploy application. PAAS provides operating environment like Java, J2EE, .Net, Window, Linux etc.
      3. IAAS (Infrastructure AS A Service) – This layer provides all basic, physical and virtual resources used in application for any organization. This includes virtual platform (space on server) on which required operating environment and application are deployed. It also includes storage and datacenter.
 In other dimension, there are 4 types of cloud computing service available.  These are Public, Private, Community and Hybrid computing.
      1. Public cloud (External Cloud) – Public cloud is offering service by third party vendor over internet. If any vendor provides infrastructure, data center, search or other service to any organization, then it comes in public cloud type. This type of cloud shares  some benefit like efficiency, High availability, elastic capacity, Low upfront cost, less or no hardware setup and less or no system management.  This type of cloud computing service is provided by Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Sun Microsystem cloud, Salesforce etc.  
      2. Private cloud (Internal cloud) – Private cloud is set up and managed by an enterprise’s own IT department and run inside the organization firewall. If any organization has large number of user and resources, then organization hosts cloud computing within their own firewall. This type of cloud computing is dedicated to that organization. It does not share any resource outside their organization. Any big organization like AT&T, Verizon or Bank of America open their infrastructure or data center near to low cost area and makes the service  available  through their own cloud, then it called as private Cloud computing. It shares some benefit like efficiency, High availability, elastic capacity, Lower cost over time, full access and flexibility, direct control over quality, service and security.
       3. Community cloud (Semi-private cloud) – Community cloud is offering service for similar type of business company. This type of cloud is public cloud but it focuses on same vertical domain companies. Like if any cloud dedicated to government or banking organization and it is serving only those types of organization, then it come as community cloud. It shares some benefit like efficiency, High availability, elastic capacity, expertise in domain knowledge, less cost over time compare to public cloud.
       4. Hybrid cloud (Integrated cloud) – Hybrid cloud is combination of any or all of the other types of cloud.  This type of cloud is  gaining lot of popularity among organizations.  This type of cloud computing give organization more flexibility to manage and share resource between private and public cloud. Like if  any organization host their application in public cloud and during peak sales time they need more server and space to handle this request, they can go for public cloud. In this type of cloud computing Model Company keeps  all sensitive data (transaction or credit card data) in private cloud and less sensitive data in public cloud. It shares  benefits like efficiency, High availability, elastic capacity, more control over quality, service and security, less cost over time compare to public and community cloud.

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What is cloud computing?

There are lot of buzz around cloud computing. Almost all big and small companies are talking about cloud computing.
                Cloud computing is service of IT (Information Technology) infrastructure and managed sharing of IT resources.
In network diagram(as shown below) internet icon is displayed like cloud. This typically means an area of the diagram or solution that is some else’s concern. The word Cloud in cloud computing is derived from this diagram.  


To understand more about cloud computing we take a car rent example. User rents a car when he needs. User never worries about car maintenance, insurance or other car expenses, he pays for car rent service only.
 Similar to car rent, cloud computing provides service over the internet.  The beauty of cloud computing is that other company hosts your application. That means they handle the cost of server, maintenance of server and manage software update as per user’s requirement. User pays less for service only. User can increase or decrease service of server as per application requirement. Like user need more server instances in November and December month due to high volume of traffic. So user can demand more server instances for those months only. There is no need to keep all server instances for the whole year. In this way the company saves a lot of money in maintenance of server.
    In summary, Cloud computing provide rapid access to computing at a lower cost of ownership, enabling companies to perform operation that may have previously been unaffordable or impractical.

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What is SOA?


Before hitting my blog, probably you heard a lot of time about the SOA buzzword.
SOA is acronym of Service Oriented Architecture.
So now the first thing which hits your mind is, what is service? How it is related with Architect?
Let me explain all these buzzwords and how they are related with each other?
Since I am related with telecommunication world, I am giving simple example how SOA comes in picture when you are activating any phone device.
Like when you buy new phone, you need to activate its number and phone features.
For activating phone user simply calls the customer care or walks to the shop. But behind the scene it communicates with many systems to activate your phone feature based on your requirement and phone device.  
Like some of the features are setting up user information, phone number, email id with phone SMS etc.
All These features are basically Services for that user which he selects or by default he gets with activation.
Now, this service can communicate with each other by n number of way. These services are not necessary to live in same platform of same system. They could be in different environment, different location or different platform.
Now these entire scenarios make your system more complicated.
   To simplify these entire scenarios SOA (Service Oriented Architect) comes in picture.
Web service and Messaging are backbone of SOA. Web service is platform independent, environment independent and location independent.
 SOA (Service Oriented Architect) describes how to communicate (Synchronous or Asynchronous) different service or feature to activate user phone. SOA also gives flexibility when this service need to be invoked and what would be sequence order of these services.