Cloud computing Characteristics

Cloud computing characteristic

There is a level of consensus emerging around the characteristics of cloud computing, or the capabilities that must be adhered to an offering to be considered a cloud. These include -

1. Pay as you go – payment is variable based on the actual consumption by the customer.
2. Highly abstracted – server hardware and related network infrastructure is highly abstracted from the users.
3. Multi-tenant – multi-tenant architectures allow numerous customer enterprises to  subscribe to the cloud computing capabilities while retaining privacy and security over their information.
4. Immediately scalable – usage, capacity, and therefore cost, can be scaled up or down with no  additional contract or penalties.

There is a widely held view that the cloud is not a new concept. Indeed, many of the technologies and services associated with cloud computing, such as Web 2.0 or virtualisation have been in existence for some time.

What is different in the cloud is that these technologies are being implemented in new ways to provide dynamic, scalable and virtualised computing infrastructure, platforms and software.

Cloud computing combines a number of computing concepts and technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which may include Web 2.0 and the virtualisation of services and communication infrastructure. These technologies have allowed cloud customer organisations to achieve: improved utilisation and efficiency of their service providers’ infrastructure through the controlled sharing of computing resources with other customers (multi-tenancy); and, greater flexibility to scale up and down IT services. In some respects, cloud computing represents the maturing of these technologies and is a marketing term to represent that maturity and the cloud services they provide.