We all are familiar with the term, Cloud Computing. According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. It simply gives access to remote computing services to use at the industry level. Since the internet revolution, cloud computing has become essential to all small-to-large industries.
Major Cloud Service Providers
At this time, there are a bunch of cloud providers in the market to meet customers’ demands. Among them, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the top three market holders. Besides that, there are some growing providers like Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure who are trying to make strong competition to expand their businesses. In addition, several providers such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode only focus on providing servers to customers and they are becoming very popular among many users for their personal projects as well as many startups and companies. According to Statista, AWS holds the largest share of the cloud market. In the 1st quarter of 2022, 33% of sales were accumulated by Amazon Web Services. Microsoft Azure took second place in the cloud market by acquiring 21% of the total share. Tech giant Google’s cloud computing platform, Google Cloud held only 8% of the revenue. The rest of the market was occupied by other vendors. Over the past few years, cloud vendors are struggling to engage in the market.
Uses of Cloud Computing Services
Currently, many large organizations use cloud computing services for their file storage, Big Data Analytics, communication between internal employees as well as external users, disaster recovery, testing software on the cloud before deploying them publicly, and many more. The most frequent uses of cloud computing services are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), hybrid cloud and multicloud, data backup, and many more. Let’s take a look at what these mean in very short detail.
1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
IaaS enables users to use a public cloud’s infrastructure for their own purposes. It allows businesses to create and manage Virtual Machines, virtual cloud network, and data storage for various use cases.
2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
PaaS gives access to customers a complete cloud principle. It lets developers and firms create, develop and host customer-focused applications.
3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
SaaS allows companies and their users to use several productive services on a subscription basis. Common examples might be Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace which we use on a daily basis for our email service, cloud storage, and communicating with co-workers to enhance productivity.
4. Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud means managing a company’s on-premises infrastructure and public cloud services under a single roof. Whether it’s a startup business or a large organization, customers may need to integrate their private cloud infrastructure with a public cloud service infrastructure. The concept of hybrid cloud makes this viable. Businesses can run some of its application on their own infrastructure whereas others can be hosted on the public cloud environment and incorporated altogether.
5. Multicloud
The idea of multicloud and hybrid cloud is almost identical. However, it brings the concept to the next level by allowing consumers to integrate two or more public cloud providers. For instance, if a company uses Amazon Web Services to track its employees and Microsoft Azure for running its applications, it can coordinate these two cloud providers to enhance efficiency.
6. Storage
By using cloud storage services, enterprises can store their data on the cloud, and access, retrieve, and distribute them as per their need. Cloud vendors provide different types of cloud storage services, for example, block and boot storage, object storage, archive storage, and many more.
Benefits Over On-Premises Solution
Before the arrival of cloud computing services, most industries used to host their data on their on-premises infrastructure. Using an on-premises solution gives the flexibility to manage and modify the data center at the company’s need, and at the same time, it also requires skilled manpower to operate servers, storage disks, and networks. By engaging with a cloud solution, enterprises not only have to worry about the health of the infrastructure but also they remove the cost as most of the time cloud service providers require a pay-per-use pricing model. That means users need to pay only for the services they consume which make the cloud solution a cost-effective key for all businesses and individuals as well.
Improvements and New Features on Cloud Structure
Cloud platforms are constantly working for the health of their hardware and software. They are continuously upgrading the machines as needed. Moreover, they are persistently introducing new instruments including new RAMs, SSDs, and CPUs. To illustrate, cloud giants like AWS and Microsoft Azure have introduced ARM-based processors in their data centers. In order to draw developers to the ARM architecture, they initiated a new program called OCI Arm Accelerator which grants credit to developers, educational institutions, industries, and their customers to contribute and run their workload in ARM environment.
Competition between Cloud Service Providers
At the beginning of this blog, we have seen that the cloud market is being very competitive. Over the years, they introduced new features, grants, hardware, and varieties to engage customers. Top cloud platforms provide a significant amount of free services. In fact, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure added virtual servers to their free offerings. Growing companies like DigitalOcean and Vultr mainly focus on small markets by providing services at a cheaper rate. All providers are continuously expanding their network by creating new regions and availability domains over the world. Undoubtedly, the impulse of moving to the cloud will be doubled in the upcoming years.