What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is mainly divided in to three:
1. SaaS – Software As A Service
Suppose you need a software for your personal or professional use, only for a week, and you don't want to spend a huge amount just for a week's use. It would be great if you can rent the software for a week for a nominal charge. Cloud based SaaS model makes this possible where the software vendor hosts the software on cloud, customers can use the software based on their need and pay only for what you use.
Adobe LiveCycle Managed Services is a best example for SaaS model.
2. PaaS – Platform As A Service
Here you will be provided a platform where you can develop your application and can be executed. So you concentrate on your application, not on the platform where it will be deployed, the PaaS service provider will do it for you. The service includes database management, security, workflow management, application serving etc. Major players in this area are Microsoft Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Force.com from SalesForce, Rackspace and Amazon EC2.
3. IaaS – Infrastructure As A Service
You are developing an application targeting a small user group, but in future you want to make it available for a large user group. Also you don't want to invest heavily on the infrastructure for this application. You can go for PaaS where the whole hardware will be provided to you based on your requirements. You can add memory, processors and storage whenever you want. You need to pay based on how much resources you use, if you are not using any service, then do not pay anything, great isn't it? Biggest players in this field are Amazon and Cisco.
Enough about Clouds, let us come back to some Android Apps which are based on cloud.
In my
next post I will list out some
Android applications which uses Cloud technology.
