What is cloud computing, what are the advantages of cloud computing

First, what is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a commercial computing model that distributes computing tasks across a large number of computers in a pool of resources that enables users to access computing power, storage space, and information services on-demand, a pool of resources known as a "cloud".

The cloud is a virtual computing resource that can be self-maintained and managed, usually a large cluster of servers, including computing servers, storage servers, and broadband resources. Cloud computing centralizes computing resources and manages them automatically through specialized software, without human involvement.

Users can dynamically apply for some of the resources to support the operation of various applications without the need to worry about tedious details, and are able to focus more on their own business, which is conducive to improving efficiency, reducing costs and technological innovation. The core concept of cloud computing is resource pooling, which is very similar to the concept of Grid Computing Pool (ComputingPool) that was proposed as early as 2002.

Grid computing pool computing and storage resources will be virtualized into a collection that can be distributed in any combination, his scale can be dynamically expanded, the processing power allocated to the user can be dynamically recycled and reused. This model can greatly improve the utilization of resources; enhance the quality of service platform.

Cloud computing is the development of parallel computing, distributed computing and grid computing, or the commercial realization of these concepts of computing science. Cloud computing is the result of a hybrid evolution and leapfrog of virtualization, utility computing and the concepts of infrastructure-as-a-service laas, platform-as-a-service PaaS and software-as-a-service SaaS.

Second, what are the advantages of cloud computing

We summarize the characteristics of cloud computing in the following areas (this summary is generally accepted):

1.Hyperscale. The "cloud" has a considerable scale, Google cloud computing already has more than 1 million servers, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo and other companies have hundreds of thousands of servers in the "cloud". "The cloud gives users unprecedented computing power.

2. Virtualization. Cloud computing allows users to access services from any location using a variety of terminals. The requested resources come from the "cloud" rather than from a fixed, tangible entity. Applications run somewhere in the "cloud", but in fact the user does not need to know the specific location of the application, just a laptop or a PDA, you can access a variety of super-capable services through network services.

3. High reliability. The "cloud" uses multiple copies of data fault tolerance, computing nodes isomorphic interchangeable and other measures to ensure high reliability of services, the use of cloud computing is more reliable than the use of local computers.

4. Generalization. Cloud computing does not target specific applications, in the "cloud" support can be constructed out of the ever-changing applications, the same "cloud" can support different applications running at the same time.

5. High scalability. "The size of the cloud can be dynamically scaled to meet the needs of application and user scale growth.

6. On-demand services. "The cloud is a huge pool of resources that users buy on demand, billed like water, electricity and gas.

7. Extremely cheap. "Cloud" of special fault-tolerance measures make it possible to use extremely cheap nodes to form a cloud; "cloud" of automated management of the data center management costs are significantly reduced; "cloud" of the public and universal utilization of resources The cloud's utility and versatility allows the utilization of resources to increase dramatically; "cloud" facilities can be built in areas with abundant power resources, thereby significantly reducing energy costs.