What is a cloud platform?

There are a ton of ways in which every individual can state the meaning of the cloud platform. But in the simplest way it can be stated as the operating system and hardware of a server in an Internet-based data centre are referred to as a cloud platform. It enables remote and large-scale coexistence of software and hardware goods.

Compute facilities, such as servers, databases, storage, analytics, networking, applications, and intelligence, are rented by businesses. As a result, businesses do not need to invest in data centres or computing facilities. They actually pay for the services they offer.

Types of Cloud Platforms

Cloud systems come in a range of shapes and sizes. None of them are suitable for all. To meet the varying needs of consumers, a range of models, forms, and services are available. They are as follows:

• Public Cloud: Third-party providers that distribute computing services over the Internet are known as public cloud platforms. A few good examples of trending and mostly used cloud platform are Google Cloud Platform, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba and IBM Bluemix.
• Private Cloud: A private cloud is normally hosted by a third-party service provider or in an on-site data centre. A private cloud platform is always dedicated to a single company and it is the key difference between the public and private cloud.
  Or we can say that a private cloud is a series of cloud computing services used primarily by one corporation or organization.
• Hybrid Cloud: The type of cloud architecture that combines both the public and private cloud systems is termed to as a Hybrid cloud platform. Data and programs are easily migrated from one to the other. This allows the company to be more flexible while still improving infrastructure, security, and enforcement.

Organizations can use a cloud platform to develop cloud-native software, test and build them, and store, back up, and recover data. The major role of it is that will not only help the company to grow but also it helps to perform the data analysis with the help of different algorithms and the results can be a true deal breaker. Streaming video and audio, embedding information into activities, and providing applications on-demand on a global scale are all possibilities.

Simply stated, cloud computing is the distribution of computing services over the Internet ("the cloud") in order to provide quicker innovation, more versatile resources, and economies of scale.

We usually only pay for the cloud services that we use, which helps us to cut costs, operate our infrastructure more effectively, and scale as our company grows.

Top benefits of cloud computing

Cloud computing represents a significant departure from how companies have traditionally seen IT services. The following are seven of the most popular reasons why businesses are moving to cloud computing services:

Cost

Cloud storage reduces the upfront costs of purchasing hardware and software, as well as the costs of setting up and operating on-site datacenters-server racks, round-the-clock power and cooling, and IT professionals to manage the infrastructure. It quickly adds up.

Global scale

The ability to scale elastically is one of the advantages of cloud computing services. In other words it simply means that we can decide the processing speed , location of the data centre where data is to be stored, storage and even the bandwidth for our process and data.

Performance

The most popular cloud computing services are hosted on a global network of protected datacenters that are updated on a regular basis with the latest generation of fast and powerful computing hardware.

Security

Many cloud providers have a comprehensive collection of policies, technologies, and controls to help us to enhance our overall security posture and protect our data, applications, and infrastructure from threats.

Speed

It means that the huge amount of calculation and the huge data retrieval as in download and upload can happen just within the blink of an eye, obviously depending on the configuration.

Reliability

Since data can be replicated at several redundant locations on the cloud provider's network, cloud storage makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity simpler and less costly.

Types

Not all clouds platform that are created are equal, and not every form of cloud computing is appropriate for every situation. A variety of models, styles, and services have emerged to help us to find the best solution for our needs.

To begin, we must decide on the type of cloud implementation or cloud infrastructure architecture that will be used to implement our cloud services.

Types of cloud services:

On the basis of its type the cloud can be divided into 3 types. They are

IaaS, PaaS, serverless and SaaS.

Understanding what these services are and how they can make our process smooth and a lot easier by knowing their right objective will help our organisation grow more.

• Type 1- The Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Cloud computing services in their most basic form. We rent IT infrastructure-servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, and operating systems-on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud provider with IaaS.

• Type 2- The Platform as a service (PaaS)

Cloud computing platforms that provide an on-demand environment for designing, testing, distributing, and managing software applications are referred to as platform as a service. PaaS was built to make it easier for developers to build web or mobile apps easily without having to worry about setting up or maintaining the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases.

• Type 3- The Software as a service (SaaS)

Software as a service (SaaS) is a method of distributing software applications over the Internet on demand and generally by subscription. SaaS allows cloud providers to host and maintain software applications and underlying infrastructure, as well as handle maintenance such as software updates and security patching.

Uses of cloud computing

Even if we don't realize it, we're probably using cloud computing right now. If we are watching a movie online, playing games, listening to music, sending email, purchasing things online, transferring money online almost anything we are somewhere using the cloud platform. The cloud has become the heart of the internet and somehow each and everything we use on internet is hosted on cloud.

While cloud computing services are just a decade old, it is already being embraced by a wide range of organizations, from small startups to large businesses, government agencies to non-profits, for a variety of reasons.

A few examples of the cloud that are use in our daily life and how it is helping the human race to make its life a lot easier.

Creation of cloud-native applications

We can Build and deploy and also scale web applications or the mobile applications or the API applications quickly with the help of the cloud native applications. Some of the examples of cloud-native technologies and approaches are microservices architecture ,Containers, API-driven communication, Kubernetes, DevOps and many more.

Testing and building the applications on cloud infrastructure

By the help of the cloud platform and its powerful infrastructure we can quickly be scaled up or down the cost of the application development and even save a lot of time.

Cloud platform can be used to Store, back up and recover of data

Transferring our data over the Internet to an offsite cloud storage system that is available from every location and device is a more cost-effective way to secure our data on a wide scale.

Analyse data

In the cloud, unify the data through departments, divisions, and places. Also the machine learning algorithms can be used on the cloud platform to predict the result of any dataset which can ultimately help us in the better analysis and decision making.

Streaming of audio and video

With high-definition video and audio that is distributed worldwide, we can communicate with our audience anywhere, at any time, on any device.