Save it on the cloud

The Cloud – a fancy word for hosting servers. In the digital world, the cloud is a widely used reference for the hosting service or environment which is connected and publicly accessible over the internet network. Because of it’s ‘intangible yet real’ context the cloud is a truly adequate nickname to what our hosting servers are all about. The cloud itself would be the internet, with hosting machines connected to it. Truth is, the data you put on the cloud, is in fact stored on an actual server, somewhere, in the real world.

When you are storing data on your Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive etc, you are essentially uploading the data on a secure server owned by respective provider. The provider would have the responsbility of keeping your data safe and maintaining the infrastructure to provide you with your own data on your demand.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing comes also in relation with the virtualization of machines. Virtualization means that an actual server hosts multiple virtual machines or servers on it. Remotely accessing this machines gives the user all the features as if the machine was real, while being hosted with other virtual machines on one physical device. Once again, the term comes into play due to its intangible reality – its virtual.

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular especially since with this approach you can customize the resources you may need according to your requirements, virtually. For example, science institutions are starting to utilize Google Cloud computing facitilities, or similar, to ‘rent out’ a virtual machine with super high performance capabilities, of which the cost to procure their own would be unreachable. Cloud computing has also advanced to a state where processing power can be provided over more than one machine at the same time, giving new possibilities to the computing capabilities, especially in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence subjects.

Well, as the IT geeks say, “There is no Cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer”…and that is a fact 🙂