Understanding the cloud has many benefits. One benefit is that it will open up job opportunities. The other is that it will allow you to take advantage of the computing power that the cloud has to offer. If you want to start a hosting service, become a managed service provider or even become a cloud provider, understanding how the cloud works is the place to start.
The simplest form of a cloud, is simply your PC. It can be configured as a cloud with the right software. Historically, this software was called server software. The first clouds consisted of just one PC configured with server software. Other PCs or terminals connected with the server (a PC with server software). often over a cable. A few computers and a server form a network. That was however yesterday’s cloud, a server and two or three computers connected to the server over a cable. Nothing spectacular, nothing really too complicated, except for the details.
The operation of today’s cloud is very similar to yesterday’s cloud (or server network). One of the primary differences though is scale. Today’s clouds are basically just hundreds of PCs, all configured with server software, or what many now call cloud software. These servers are located in data centers, in server racks. The data centers are often large buildings, but these buildings are getting smaller every day as the size of the latest servers becomes smaller and new servers become more computationally powerful. The other difference between yesterdays server networks and today’s cloud networks, is that a cable is no longer needed to connect the PC (called the client) to the server. Wireless connections suffice. Through the wireless world and the wired infrastructure of the Internet, a client, or PC, can connect to a server within a cloud anywhere in the world.
The operation of a cloud network or a server network are very similar. When a PC, connects to the Internet, you effectively connect to the cloud or more precisely a server in the cloud or in other words a server somewhere in a data center somewhere in the world.
When you visit a web site, you are actually just visiting another PC (that is connected through server software). The link you click is actually letting you view a file (in most cases a HTML file). on a remote computer. The file was put on the server by the owner of the web site. The web site owner placed the file or text onto a server in the cloud. Which server the file was placed on and in which data center is up to the cloud provider that the owner of the web site has purchased (or rented in most cases) hosting services from.
Lets take an example. Use a blog for instance. I type in text into my blog, press the submit button. Once that button is pressed the text is transported to a data center, specifically a server in the data center. Or more specifically into some server’s memory. The text is assigned a file directory location in the server’s memory that sits on a server rack within a data center. The data center’s data administrator can examine all the files on each of the servers n the data center, just like you can view all the files on your PC in the file directory. Some data centers provide security functions that don’t allow the data center administrator to view the files, but many don’t. Either way, once you hit submit your blog text data is saved and you can access it on your PC by accessing its link or URL, or looked at another way, the file location on a server’s memory in a data center somewhere in the world.
