Introduction for Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing?

It is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

According to the above diagram, end-user can connect to the internet and get services like creating virtual machines, databases and many more irrespective of bothering about the hardware, software support of his personal devices.

Types of Clouds.

1. Public Clouds — AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure
2. Private Clouds — we can set up on-premises clouds using software like VMware and OpenStack.

Types of Cloud Computing services

1. Infrastructure as a Service. (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service. (PaaS)
3. Software as a Service. (SaaS)

This diagram shows the level of abstraction in 3 methods.

• On premisses, machines are the devices we are using. We can manage every layer of it.
• Amazon Web Services(AWS) provides IaaS. Users can create virtual machines, install different runtimes and deploy applications.

ex: create an ubuntu virtual machine, install JRE(java runtime environment) and deploy a java web application.

• Elastic Beanstalk is an example of PaaS provided by AWS. users can deploy their applications irrespectively considering infrastructure.

ex: Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles deploying applications, auto-scaling, load balancing, etc.

• With SaaS, a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet.

Let’s get started with cloud computing by using AWS educate version as the cloud service provider.

You can create an AWS free account by providing credit card details or if your education institute provides and AWS educate account, you can use that.

You can log into the AWS educate account by this. Click AWS Account and then click AWS educate starter account. Then by clicking the AWS console, you will be directed for the AWS services.

Let’s create a virtual machine in the AWS cloud platform.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a central part of the AWS platform by providing to create virtual machines.

Click EC2 and then by clicking launch instance you can start to launch a virtual machine on AWS.

AWS provides AMIs which are images of various Operating Systems we can start off to build our virtual machine. let’s proceed with the Ubuntu server image which is eligible for the free tier account we are using for the educate version.

You can select it and will be prompted to allocate memory and the number of CPUs for the virtual machine. But for the free account, we have to use only the free tier eligible machine which includes 1 core CPU, 1GB RAM, and 8GB SSD. By clicking review and launch your virtual machine will be created with default settings. But if you need some more configurations you can proceed and at the end launch the VM.

At last, you will be asked to provide key pair to securely log in to the machine. You can provide your existing key pair of generating by AWS. You have to keep the key secret and whenever you need to login to the VM, you can use it.

After clicking view instance you will be prompted to the panel which shows the details about currently running AWS Ec2 instances.

By clicking the 1st square box, which is the Ec2 instance we created now, the Connect button will be enabled and you can see the details of how to connect to Ec2 instance.

Copy the highlighted text and paste it in your terminal. Especially your key file should be available in the current directory of the terminal.