What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is a network of remote servers hosted on the internet for storing and retrieving data. The cloud provides a number of IT services such as servers, databases, software, virtual storage, and networking, among others Companies that offer all the services mentioned above are called cloud providers. They provide you with the ability to store and retrieve data and run applications, managing them through configuration portals. Two of the best cloud providers available today are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud platforms offer some significant benefits today, which are driving businesses to adopt cloud computing. Those major benefits include:

# Speed

# Cost

# Scalability

# Accessibility

# Better Security

Different pricing models offered by AWS and write a post in own words.

Pay-as-you-go
With AWS, you only pay for what you use, helping your organization remain agile, responsive, and always able to meet scale demands.
Pay-as-you-go pricing allows you to easily adapt to changing business needs without overcommitting budgets, improving your responsiveness to changes. With a pay-as-you go model, you can adapt your business depending on need and not on forecasts, reducing the risk of overprovisioning or missing capacity.
By paying for services on an as-needed basis, you can redirect your to innovation and invention, reducing procurement complexity and enabling your business to be fully elastic.

Save when you commit
Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that provides significant savings on your AWS usage. This pricing model offers lower prices on AWS compute and AWS machine learning. Savings Plans offer savings over on-demand in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount (measured in dollars per hour) of an AWS service or a category of services for a one- or three-year period.
You can sign up for savings plans for a 1- or 3-year term and easily manage your plans by taking advantage of recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts in the AWS Cost Explorer.

Pay less by using more
With AWS, you can get volume-based discounts and realize important savings as your usage increases. For services such as S3 and data transfer OUT from EC2, pricing is tiered, meaning the more you use, the less you pay per GB. In addition, data transfer is always free of charge. As a result, as your AWS usage needs increase, you benefit from the economies of scale that allow you to increase adoption and keep costs under control.
As your organization evolves, AWS also gives you options to acquire services that help you address your business needs.

For example, AWS’ storage services portfolio offers options to help you lower pricing based on how frequently you access data and the performance you need to retrieve it. To optimize your savings, choose the right combinations of storage solutions that help you reduce costs while preserving performance, security, and durability.

Differentiate between on-premises, on-cloud, and hybrid cloud computing models.
Public/on- Cloud
In a public cloud, everything is stored and accessed through the internet. This deployment system allows anyone with proper permissions to access some of the applications and resources. The most exciting part about the public cloud is that you own none of the components present in it, be it the hardware, software,or application. All the components here are managed by the provider. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are two prominent examples of the public cloud

Private/premises Cloud

A private cloud is used exclusively by organizations, which they can run locally or choose to outsource to other cloud service providers. This infrastructure runs strictly on a private network, which means that people present on the network can only access it. VMware cloud and some of the AWS products are some of examples of private cloud

Hybrid cloud
is probably the most fascinating form of cloud computing that contains the functionality of both public and private clouds. Organizations using the hybrid cloud can choose to keep some of their data locally and some on the cloud. NASA is the best-known example of an organization that uses a hybrid cloud.

Explore laas, Paas, and saas with examples.
Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service)

This category consists of IT infrastructure that you can rent from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis, including servers, networks, and others. The best part about this service is that you have access to the services you provisioned, and some grant you root-level access as well. EC2, or the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, is an excellent example of IaaS

PaaS (Platform as a Service)
In this model, you are supplied with a pre-built platform from the cloud providers, where you can deploy your codes and applications. You only need to manage the codes and the applications, not the infrastructure. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an example of a SaaS cloud

SaaS (Software as a Service)

Here, the cloud providers offer you the end product, which could be an application or software that you can buy directly through a subscription. As a part of this service, the client maintains control of the software environment but does not maintain any equipment. There are some products from AWS and Microsoft Azure that provide SaaS.

Multi cloud

Multi-cloud is a cloud approach made up of more than one cloud service from more than one cloud vendor—public or private.

For example, your enterprise invests in expanding its cloud infrastructure. You've moved from bare-metal servers to virtualization-based workloads, and now you're evaluating public cloud options—not for everything, but to support a specific customer-facing application with highly variable use rates. After some research, you find the public cloud provider that has the right blend of service-level agreements (SLAs), security protocols, and uptime to host your custom application. You’re happy with your choice. But eventually, customers start asking for features that are only available through a different vendor’s proprietary app. Integrating these features into your custom app requires that you not only purchase the vendor’s app, but also host the app in that vendor’s proprietary public cloud—a solution that allows both apps to scale with demand.