Sep 10 2011, 02:22 AM
On the internet, when you access a webpage you are basically pulling a file off of another computer configured to serve it to your web browser. The cloud is essentially a fancy bunch of computers in which people rent.
A cloud is just a cluster of servers. The cloud revolution that people reference these days simply means that instead of buying or renting individual machines, you can rent the computational resources themselves only as you need them from a large pool of machines. There is tons of fancy software to make things easier but at it's core, it is just renting computational resources instead of machines themselves. It allows for systems to scale easily on other peoples hardware, and reduces costs while improving reliability due to the centralization of hardware capacity across mega server farms. It is a lot cheaper for amazon to build one million node cluster than for 10000 people to build a 100 node cluster (10k data centers vs 1 big one) and thats really the central concept of everything 'cloud'.
Instead of buying a gasoline generator to get electricity you purchase the resources from a power company. Clouds are essentially the same concept but with computers instead of generators, and computational resources instead of electricity.
A cloud is just a cluster of servers. The cloud revolution that people reference these days simply means that instead of buying or renting individual machines, you can rent the computational resources themselves only as you need them from a large pool of machines. There is tons of fancy software to make things easier but at it's core, it is just renting computational resources instead of machines themselves. It allows for systems to scale easily on other peoples hardware, and reduces costs while improving reliability due to the centralization of hardware capacity across mega server farms. It is a lot cheaper for amazon to build one million node cluster than for 10000 people to build a 100 node cluster (10k data centers vs 1 big one) and thats really the central concept of everything 'cloud'.
Instead of buying a gasoline generator to get electricity you purchase the resources from a power company. Clouds are essentially the same concept but with computers instead of generators, and computational resources instead of electricity.
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