Welcome to the updated beginner’s guide to cloud computing for 2019. In recent years, cloud computing has become increasingly popular, with businesses of all sizes moving their services to the cloud. From online orders to social media posts to the article you’re reading right now, everything is stored, processed, and delivered over the cloud. This guide will help you understand what cloud computing is, its advantages, and the different types of cloud computing solutions available.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a distributed network of computers that makes multiple copies of your data in separate machines. This means that if one server goes down, another takes over, ensuring that computation never stops. Cloud computing includes storage, processing power, and content delivery. Traditional local storage keeps files on your hard drive, while cloud storage stores files on the web, distributed across remote servers and accessed through the internet.
Different Types of Cloud Computing
There are three primary types of cloud computing solutions based on their deployment: public, private, and hybrid. A private cloud is like your own Uber – you don’t share it with others and use it only for your commute. A public cloud is like an Uber Pool – you commute with people going to the same destination. A hybrid cloud is a mix of both.
The Cost of Cloud Computing
The cost of renting a private or public cloud is similar to your Uber ride. Private cabs (or cloud deployments) cost more, but they are more secure and can be placed behind your company’s firewall. Public cloud is very cost-effective but has certain security limitations when compared to private cloud. Hybrid cloud combines the best of both worlds, allowing enterprises to securely store sensitive data in the private cloud while offloading batch processing of public or anonymized data to the public cloud.
Advantages of Cloud Computing
The core technology behind cloud computing has rapidly evolved, but the basic advantages of adopting cloud computing remain the same. These include availability and redundancy, a pay-as-you-go model, and scalability. The cloud is a network of multiple, interconnected computers with identical copies of your data, ensuring high availability and redundancy. With a pay-as-you-go model, you only pay for the resources you use, and for high-performance cloud clusters, you can even rent them for a couple of hours and be billed only for them. Scalability enables you to simply buy more computing power as and when you need it.
Leading Cloud Computing Providers
There are multiple industry-leading cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM, and Alibaba Cloud. Most of the best WordPress hosting providers use one of these leading cloud providers to offer their services. For instance, Kinsta is a popular managed WordPress hosting provider that’s fully hosted in Google Cloud. Other services like Cloudways offer managed cloud WordPress hosting in AWS, Google Cloud, and others.
Cloud Computing and WordPress
In this post series, we’ll discuss how to install WordPress in major cloud providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, and other industry-standard cloud providers. If you have any questions on cloud computing or cloud hosting in general, feel free to ask us. You can also directly ask us on Twitter @souravify, and we’ll be happy to answer your questions. Here’s to an exciting journey – let’s get started!
