It provides hardware and software resources remotely over the internet. Resources can be softwares, systems, computation, disk, storage, containers, DevOps tools, DataOps tools, networking, analytics etc. Different cloud providers provide different products and services based upon different pricing and usage models. But some of the products are common to all cloud providers even though different cloud products might have different services offered within them. Cloud Computing is a broad domain in IT that covers almost every aspect of software development, delivery, observation, governance, management and orchestration. It has services, features and products for running software’s on its hardware resources such as CPU, memory o hard disk. It also has products for storing, visualizing, searching and analyzing data (NoSQL or SQL).

Cloud also provides numerous DevOps tools for almost dozens of categories and types. Almost all services required to build any type of enterprise software can be used in cloud. Cloud has different types of models such as platform, infrastructure, data and software as a service.

Cloud model of computing where containers, virtual machines, servers, networks, storage, development tools, and even applications (apps) are used through the internet. More than 40 million websites are hosted on different cloud providers. Millions of companies develop, deploy and monitor their applications on cloud or migrate from on premise to cloud. Digitization and Automation in corporate world is accelerating movement towards cloud.

Common characteristics of any cloud:

On Demand Service : Hardware and Software resources are utilized as need on demand and can be scaled up or scaled down.
Broad Network Access : Resources, Systems and Products are accessed through internet. They can be accessed by different thick or thin clients as per business needs.
Resource Pooling : Resources are shared among customers with each customer provided with dedicated services and products and those services don’t overlap with each other.
Rapid Elasticity : Cloud providers are highly efficient, flexible and nimble and services can be provisioned for use or released if not required without any hassle or management on customer’s end.

1. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
4. Traditional (On-Premises)
5. Colocation Mechanism
6. Hosting Mechanism

Cloud Computing Benefits:

1. Financially Economical
2. Secure than Traditional on Premises Systems
3. Flexible to change
4. Mobility than a traditional software on premises
5. Increased Collaboration
6. Loss Prevention of Data
7. Disaster Recovery
8. Automatic Upgrades to Features, APIs, Services and Softwares
9. Competitive Edge with more features
10. Scalable than traditional enterprise system
11. On Demand Service Available
12. Rapid Elasticity
13. Monitoring, Support, Operational Tools and Services available
14. Automation and Configuration Management available
15. More resilient than non cloud enterprise systems
16. Large Network Access available
17. Many services provided on spot
18. Administration can be Outsourced
19. Features and Services specific to industries are available in modern day Cloud Providers
20. Option to use hundreds of Cloud Integrations
21. Option to use Hybrid and Multi Cloud models
22. Bigdata and Data Centric Applications are suitable for Cloud
23. Gaming, Social Media Sites, Streaming Sites are suitable for Cloud
24. Many features provided by Cloud for Distributed Systems
25. Event Driven Architectures supported by Cloud

NOTE : Some of the largest cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, IBM, Oracle and GCP have 100s of different services and products offered.

Each product or service in itself has different use cases, different categories of features as per customer usage pay model. Each service or a product also has different types of architectural models and offerings for softwares as broad as Event Driven Systems, Microservices, Distributed, Serverless Functions, Legacy Systems and Bigdata platforms. Cloud provides also offer 100s of software tools covering end to end spectrum of DataOps, DevOps, Platform & Infrastructure, Automation, Configuration and Governance.