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What is Cloud Computing?
So, before we get into the why, let’s go over the what a little bit more (if you’re familiar with services like EC2 or S3, feel free to skip this part). In a nutshell, cloud computing is really nothing more than virtualized private servers on steroids. Traditionally, if you wanted to host a site or app you would either get a shared hosting account somewhere, or get your own dedicated box (or many boxes). This generally works fine, but there are a lot of drawbacks to the so-called traditional way of doing things. We’ll get into this in a little bit, but for the moment we only need to know that these solutions involved actual physical servers. A dedicated server is just that, a dedicated piece of hardware for you to use… shared hosting is similar in the fact that you’re merely a tenant on a dedicated server (you could relate it to renting an apartment vs. owning a home).
Anyway, cloud computing is essentially the same as dedicated hosting, except for one very important distinction: you’re not using a physical server, your server is virtualized. That’s it, it’s really that simple! However, this simplicity has a lot of very important benefits that lead it to beat the hell out of any traditional hosting situation. It also has one very significant draw-back as well. We’ll get into these next…
Via : www.gen-x-design.com/archives/the-importance-of-cloud-com...
What is Cloud Computing?
So, before we get into the why, let’s go over the what a little bit more (if you’re familiar with services like EC2 or S3, feel free to skip this part). In a nutshell, cloud computing is really nothing more than virtualized private servers on steroids. Traditionally, if you wanted to host a site or app you would either get a shared hosting account somewhere, or get your own dedicated box (or many boxes). This generally works fine, but there are a lot of drawbacks to the so-called traditional way of doing things. We’ll get into this in a little bit, but for the moment we only need to know that these solutions involved actual physical servers. A dedicated server is just that, a dedicated piece of hardware for you to use… shared hosting is similar in the fact that you’re merely a tenant on a dedicated server (you could relate it to renting an apartment vs. owning a home).
Anyway, cloud computing is essentially the same as dedicated hosting, except for one very important distinction: you’re not using a physical server, your server is virtualized. That’s it, it’s really that simple! However, this simplicity has a lot of very important benefits that lead it to beat the hell out of any traditional hosting situation. It also has one very significant draw-back as well. We’ll get into these next…
Via : www.gen-x-design.com/archives/the-importance-of-cloud-com...