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Dr Hammoud – Cloud Computing





What is cloud computing?

According to Microsoft Azure, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.

Is cloud computing a new technology per se? In other words, what are the unique technology features of cloud computing, if any?

Cloud computing is more of a new paradigm or model of using technology rather than a completely new technology itself. At its core, cloud computing leverages existing technologies—such as virtualization, distributed computing, and the internet—to deliver computing resources (like servers, storage, and applications) over the internet.

What are the three major cloud service models?

According to Cloudticity, The three main cloud computing service models are

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS)
  • Software as a Service (SaaS).

Name at least 3 real-world domains where the application of cloud computing was (or can be) very enabling and effective.  

Digital Storage, mobile and web apps, ML & AI wandb.ai, Email, and many more!

What is the economic/business model of cloud computing?  

Usually, it is a pay-as-you-go service, which means that you only pay what you consume on the platform. As an example, I'm quite familiar with Google's Firebase suite of tools. There, you only pay per query you make and that means that there's virtually no fixed costs to hosting on the cloud, which makes it very attractive for small to medium sized enterprises.