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Registered User
Currently Offline
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Posts: 1
Join Date: Jun 2011
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I know it is pretty late. But just wanted to put in my two small cents here. This is an attempt to explain to those who are looking for a brief description.
The original concept of cloud computing was a utility-like service that would provide a pool of shared resources for clients to use on-demand – thereby allowing customers to leverage a large pool of resources without having to bear the burden of the capital cost of building or maintaining the entire infrastructure themselves. In the web hosting world what we refer to as “cloud computing” sometimes aligns with this original concept, sometimes not so much, depending on the service in question.
All cloud products that are offered as a web hosting service have one thing in common: they are virtualized. "Virtualized" means that your “server” (whether called an “instance”, “slice” or something else by your service provider) is actually a virtualized operating system (kernel) that is referred to as a “virtual machine”, or VM. The VM is running inside a “container” system, which is in charge of managing the resources of multiple VMs running alongside yours. There are several products that do this, some of which you may be familiar with – some of the more well known products out there are VmWare, VirtualBox, and XEN.
Although all cloud products are virtualized, not all virtualized hosting services are cloud services. What distinguishes the two is:
** The ability to scale dynamically
** Adding or removing resources can be controlled by the customer through an API
** Have the utilized resources billed out by some small increment, such as by the hour or day (although some providers do have larger billable increments, such as week or months)
This flexibility is generally considered to be the largest advantage of a cloud product over your more standard virtualized private server, it allows you to dial up and down resources, on-demand and as-needed, without having to commit to a lot of hardware that comes with a bunch of unused overhead during non-peak hours
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