What are the benefits, advantages of cloud computing?

 What are the benefits, advantages of cloud computing?

• Scalability 
• Agility 
• High Availability
• Pay as you go
• Moving from Capex to Opex
• Fault Tolerance
• High Response Time
• High Bandwidth
• Low Latency  

Scalability 

It can be termed as an ability of the application to handle growing amount of work without degrading the performance. Basically system can grow without limits based on demand. Scalability is of 2 types – 

1. Vertical or Scale Up – In this type of scaling configuration we increase the capacity of the existing hardware or machine. For example, if you are having a desktop of 4GB RAM and tomorrow you increase the RAM of your machine to 16GB then this is nothing but the vertical scaling.

2. Horizontal or Scale Out – In this type of scaling configuration we increase the count of machines without increasing the capacity. For example, if you have a server of 8GB RAM and tomorrow you put another server of same RAM and so on. When you do horizontal scaling essentially you increase the computing power in parallel so you get better performance. This is horizontal scaling. 

Agility 

The system is easy to evolve as business changes. This defines a degree to which your application can be evolved/ changed/ modified depending on the business or requirement changes.  

High Availability 

Basically this defines how much your application is available for its end users. Customers or users will always expect zero downtime of the application. High availability means your application can withstand below common types of downtime scenarios – 

• Hardware failures
• Application updates 
• Configuration changes 
• OS update restarts 
• Heavy load restarts 

Pay as you go

This is the most lucrative benefit of cloud. With cloud you pay only for what you use. If you are not in the need of resources, you can free them/ de-allocate them and you are not charged for it. The billing is absolutely “per minute” billing giving you more saving on cost.  

Fault Tolerance 

It is the ability of the system to continue operating in full capacity and fully functional in the event of failure of some of its components. This simply means, if I have a web application and interacting with database then if the database is not accessible/down still my web application will be available for users. This means your application is fault tolerant.