What are the cloud services?

Photo by Mars Technology

Hi, How is it going? I think everything will be ok. So Guys, In our previous article, we discuss what is cloud computing in base ways. Now we going to talk about what is the cloud services. Let's briefly discuss the most common two services that all cloud providers offer.

• Compute power
• storage

Compute power

When you build solutions using cloud computing, you can choose how you want to work to be done based on your resources and needs. For example, if you want to have more control and responsibility for maintenance, you could create a virtual machine. (A virtual machine is an emulation of a computer. Just like your desktop or laptop, you're using now.) Each virtual machine includes an operating system and hardware that appears to the user like a physical computer running Windows or Linux. you can then install whatever software you need to do the task you want to run in the cloud.

Virtual Machine form existing windows 10 PC- photo by maketecheasier.com

The difference is that you don't have to buy any of the hardware or install the OS. The cloud provider runs your virtual machine on a physical server in one of their datacenters. They often share that server with other virtual machines(Isolated and secure). With the cloud, you can have a virtual machine ready to go in minutes at less cost than a physical computer.

Virtual machines aren't the only computing choice. there are two other popular options.

• Containers
• Serverless computing

Containers

Containers provide a consistent, isolated execution environment for applications. They are similar to the virtual machine. But they don't require a guest operating system. For example, the application and all dependencies are packed into a "container". Then a standard runtime environment is used to execute the app. This allows the container to start up in just a few seconds because there is no OS to boot and initialize. You only need an app to launch.

The open-source project, Docker, is one of the leading platforms for managing containers. In our next articles, we'll discuss more docker.

Serverless computing

Serverless computing lets you run application code without creating, configuring, or maintaining a server. The core idea is that your application is broken into separate functions that run when triggered by some action. This is idle for automated tasks. For example, you can build a serverless process that automatically sends an email confirmation after a customer makes an online purchase.

Photo by Microsoft Learn

Storage

Most devices and applications read and/or write data.

ex:

• Taking a picture
• Sending an email
• leaving a voicemail
• Buying a movie ticket online
• looking up the price of an online item

In all of these cases, data is either read (looking up the price) or written (taking a picture). The type of data and how it's store can be different in each of these cases.

Cloud providers typically offer services that can handle all of these types of data. For example, if you want to store text or movie clip, you could use a file or disk. if you had a set of relationships such as an address book, you could take a more structured approach like using a database.

The advantage of using cloud-based data storage is you can scale to meet your needs. if you find that you need more space to store your movie clips you can pay a little more and add to your valuable space. in some cases, the storage can even expand and contract automatically. So you pay for exactly what you need at any given point in time.

Cloud computing services fall into 4 categories.

• Infrastructure as a service(Iaas)
• Platform as a service(Paas)
• Software as a service(Saas)
• Functions as a Service(Faas)

These 4 are also the main types of cloud computing. In our next articles, we'll discuss that.

We will meet again. Keep in touch.

reference

Microsoft learn