What is Cloud Computing Architecture?

The term cloud refers to a network or the internet. It is a technology that uses remote servers on the internet to store, manage, and access data online rather than local drives. The data can be anything such as files, images, documents, audio, video, and more.

There are the following operations that we can do using cloud computing:

• Developing new applications and services
• Storage, back up, and recovery of data
• Hosting blogs and websites
• Delivery of software on demand
• Analysis of data
• Streaming videos and audios

Why Cloud Computing?

Small as well as large IT companies, follow the traditional methods to provide the IT infrastructure. That means for any IT company, we need a Server Room that is the basic need of IT companies.

In that server room, there should be a database server, mail server, networking, firewalls, routers, modem, switches, QPS (Query Per Second means how much queries or load will be handled by the server), configurable system, high net speed, and the maintenance engineers.

To establish such IT infrastructure, we need to spend lots of money. To overcome all these problems and to reduce the IT infrastructure cost, Cloud Computing comes into existence.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The characteristics of cloud computing are given below:

1) Agility

The cloud works in a distributed computing environment. It shares resources among users and works very fast.

2) High availability and reliability

The availability of servers is high and more reliable because the chances of infrastructure failure are minimum.

3) High Scalability

Cloud offers “on-demand” provisioning of resources on a large scale, without having engineers for peak loads.

4) Multi-Sharing

With the help of cloud computing, multiple users and applications can work more efficiently with cost reductions by sharing common infrastructure.

5) Device and Location Independence

Cloud computing enables the users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they use e.g. PC, mobile phone, etc. As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.

6) Maintenance

Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, since they do not need to be installed on each user’s computer and can be accessed from different places. So, it reduces the cost also.

7) Low Cost

By using cloud computing, the cost will be reduced because to take the services of cloud computing, IT company need not to set its own infrastructure and pay-as-per usage of resources.

8) Services in the pay-per-use mode

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are provided to the users so that they can access services on the cloud by using these APIs and pay the charges as per the usage of services.

Cloud Computing Architecture

As we know, cloud computing technology is used by both small and large organizations to store the information in the cloud and access it from anywhere at any time using the internet connection.

Cloud computing architecture is a combination of service-oriented architecture and event-driven architecture.

Cloud computing architecture is divided into the following two parts –

• Front End
• Back End

The below diagram shows the architecture of cloud computing –

Front End

The front end is used by the client. It contains client-side interfaces and applications that are required to access the cloud computing platforms. The front end includes web servers (including Chrome, Firefox, internet explorer, etc.), thin & fat clients, tablets, and mobile devices.

Back End

The back end is used by the service provider. It manages all the resources that are required to provide cloud computing services. It includes a huge amount of data storage, security mechanism, virtual machines, deploying models, servers, traffic control mechanisms, etc.

Note: Both front end and back end are connected to others through a network, generally using the internet connection.

Components of Cloud Computing Architecture

There are the following components of cloud computing architecture –

1. Client Infrastructure

Client Infrastructure is a Front end component. It provides GUI (Graphical User Interface)  to interact with the cloud.

2. Application

The application may be any software or platform that a client wants to access.

3. Service

A Cloud Services manages which type of service you access according to the client’s requirement.

Cloud computing offers the following three type of services:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS) – It is also known as cloud application services. Mostly, SaaS applications run directly through the web browser means we do not require to download and install these applications. Some important example of SaaS is given below –

Example: Google Apps, Salesforce Dropbox, Slack, Hubspot, Cisco WebEx.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) – It is also known as cloud platform services. It is quite similar to SaaS, but the difference is that PaaS provides a platform for software creation, but using SaaS, we can access software over the internet without the need of any platform.

Example: Windows Azure, Force.com, Magento Commerce Cloud, OpenShift.

3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – It is also known as cloud infrastructure services. It is responsible for managing applications data, middleware, and runtime environments.

Example: Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Cisco Metapod.

4. Runtime Cloud

Runtime Cloud provides the execution and runtime environment to the virtual machines.

5. Storage

Storage is one of the most important components of cloud computing. It provides a huge amount of storage capacity in the cloud to store and manage data.

6. Infrastructure

It provides services on the host level, application level, and network level. Cloud infrastructure includes hardware and software components such as servers, storage, network devices, virtualization software, and other storage resources that are needed to support the cloud computing model.

7. Management

Management is used to manage components such as application, service, runtime cloud, storage, infrastructure, and other security issues in the backend and establish coordination between them.

8. Security

Security is an in-built back end component of cloud computing. It implements a security mechanism in the back end.

9. Internet

The Internet is medium through which front end and back end can interact and communicate with each other.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

As we all know that Cloud computing is trending technology. Almost every company switched their services on the cloud to raise the company’s growth.

Here, we are going to discuss some important advantages of Cloud Computing-

1) Back-up and restore data

Once the data is stored in the cloud, it is easier to get back-up and restore that data using the cloud.

2) Improved collaboration

Cloud applications improve collaboration by allowing groups of people to quickly and easily share information in the cloud via shared storage.

3) Excellent accessibility

Cloud allows us to quickly and easily access store information anywhere, anytime in the whole world, using an internet connection. An internet cloud infrastructure increases organization productivity and efficiency by ensuring that our data is always accessible.

4) Low maintenance cost

Cloud computing reduces both hardware and software maintenance costs for organizations.

5) Mobility

Cloud computing allows us to easily access all cloud data via mobile.

6) IServices in the pay-per-use model

Cloud computing offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the users for access services on the cloud and pays the charges as per the usage of service.

7) Unlimited storage capacity

Cloud offers us a huge amount of storage capacity for storing our important data such as documents, images, audio, video, etc. in one place.

8) Data security

Data security is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing. Cloud offers many advanced features related to security and ensures that data is securely stored and handled.