Cloud is the most sought after word of current time. 2014 is referred to, as a year of 'S.C.A.M.' where

S = Social

C = Cloud

A = Analytics

M = Mobile

So, let's talk about the advantages of cloud and the reason of its worldwide popularity. Cloud is nothing but aggregation of multiple servers or computers, operating together for some particular work. When all such resources are aggregated together with multiple servers (ranging from 2 to unlimited), it forms the powerful cloud computing platform. As per the facts, there are different layers available to manage it, which is popularly known as Orchestration.

In order to understand this in even more simpler words, an example of 'Grid' would be the best to be discussed. In case of grid, all the power producers together consolidate production at a place called 'Grid', which further distributes power to different utilities depending on the load and availability. Cloud is similarly considered to be a grid of all such computing devices (servers or computers) working together to aggregate all the compute power at one single platform.

Now to manage such platform and collectively use such compute, a hypervisor is required. The most popular hypervisors are Xen, KVM, VMware and HyperV along with the management layer. The highly preferred hypervisors are CloudStack and OpenStack.

Now, the question which arises here is- Why do you need to aggregate all such resources or compute?

Well, the answer to this would be very much surprising and would surely convince you to move, once you gain understanding of the concept. Consider that you are a PC user at home and you love new technology. Therefore, you need more power for your laptop. What will you do here?

-  First of all, you will take 17 laptop, which have more cores and Ghz

-  You will take more RAM

-  You need storage of 100 GB for present, but you will ask for 1000 GB considering the future requirements

In case, you are into a business and are hosting something on server. You will ensure that it has futuristic processor, which can fulfill your needs for coming years. No matter whether you are just using 10-20% of its resource today, it is crucial to be done. I at your place would have done this as business cannot invest daily nor can it get into such type of non-core hassles.

What Does This Mean For?

  a) Individual

  b) Business

Individual: Investment of money and technology depreciation cost

Business: Investment of more capital, higher interest and fear of technology obsoletion

What is proved here is that both business and individuals are spending big chunk of money for better resources and at the end, they have a fear of technology, obsoleting and depreciation.

Well 'Cloud' which people really have different understanding about can help in offering solution to this. Individual/ Business can simply choose Cloud Hosting Service Provider, which will not only help in saving capital costs but would also provide best of class compute, power, storage, processing and other required resources. Business can simply host the application on cloud at fraction of costs and individuals can simply choose provider to similar staff, which is possible on laptop.

Benefits are Numerous and cannot be figured in a single article, however, just for clear understanding there are some important benefits:

1. Cost savings: There are no capex cost and you just need to pay the rentals

2. Redundancy: what if your laptop on server crashes. What will happen to your data? No answer.... But when you are on 'Cloud' it is the responsibility of provider to ensure that things are there in the required place. For provider, there are various customers and hence, it provides economy for scale.

3. Greener Planet: If you are not willing to do anything for yourself, then at least plan something for 'mother nature'. You use your laptop for 5 hours on server and business uses server for 12- 18 hours. If you are on cloud, it is one demand computing. Whatever resources you require are available, whenever needed. In meanwhile, when it's not in use, then someone else is utilizing those resources. What you are doing here is just using what you need and hence lesser usage if processors, RAM & HDD, which in turn will save our natural resources like iron-ore, electricity required for manufacturing of such devices.

4. Applications: you get more apps or more features with your OS at fraction of costs, which otherwise would have proved quite expensive.

5. Better Manageability: you don't need a technology to configure anything or add some hardware at the time of requirement. Nowadays, most cloud service providers offer self-management portal, which helps to add/remove resources on just a click of mouse.

Overall, world is moving towards cloud hosting service and so should you. It can only bring advantages rather than disadvantages. Promise me that you will at least think twice before purchasing any server for business use or computer for personal usage.

Save Earth, Save People!