This article is from WeChat official account:fresh jujube class (ID: xzclasscom)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: Jun jujube, title figure from: vision China

On August 9, 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Eric Schmidt) at the Search Engine Conference On (SES San Jose 2006), first proposed “cloud computing”(Cloud Computing) concept.

Five months before the conference, in March 2006, Amazon, the e-commerce company, officially launched its own elastic computing cloud (Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) service.

The occurrence of these two iconic events officially announced the arrival of the cloud computing era, and also means that the development of the Internet has entered a new stage.

To this day, fourteen years have passed. Cloud computing has experienced doubts and enthusiasm. It has gradually been accepted by people and has entered a stage of steady development.

However, as a lofty term and a well-known concept, it is still difficult for us to give an accurate and easy-to-understand definition of cloud computing.

The definition given by professional organizations will always make people feel like a cloud——

A computing method that can deliver scalable and flexible IT capabilities as services to external users through Internet technology. (Gartner Corporation)

A standardized IT performance (service, software or infrastructure) that is delivered through Internet technology in a pay-per-use and self-service manner. (ForresterResearch Company)

Cloud computing is a model that can obtain required resources from a configurable computing resource sharing pool anytime, anywhere, conveniently, and on-demand. Resources can be quickly supplied and released, enabling management workload and service providers The intervention is reduced to a minimum. (American National Institute of Standards and Technology)

The reason, I think there are two aspects.

First, different people have completely different perspectives on cloud computing.

“There is a thousand Hamlet in a thousand people.” Different people have different definitions and different ideas about cloud computing. For example:

Technical engineers believe that cloud computing is a technology and a profession.

Businessmen believe: Cloud computing is a business model, a profitable business.

Ordinary users believe that cloud computing is a service they often use.

The financial director and boss believe that cloud computing is capital investment and cost.

The second reason,I think it’s because cloud computing is so huge that “blind people touch the elephant.” A thinks A is cloud computing, B thinks B is cloud computing, and C thinks C is cloud computing. Everyone said different things, and could not give a unified definition.

Actually, I think, cloud computing is “cloud” + “computing”. “Calculation” is an act. And “cloud” is a model, method, or idea.

We are very familiar with calculations. Thinking in the human brain is a way of calculation. Calculation is the processing and calculation of information and data. This is a very broad concept.

We play games, and the character modeling and movement control in it belong to calculation. When we watch the video, the image encoding and decoding in it belongs to calculation. When we shop online, pricing is also a calculation.

In the information age, computing is everywhere.

However, just as people need brains for thinking and tools for work, computing cannot do without resources.

Computer resources in the information age include not only hardware resources such as CPU, memory, hard disk, and graphics card, but also software resources such as operating systems, databases, runtime libraries, middleware, and applications.

The “cloud” is a new way of obtaining these resources.

The counterpart to cloud computing is traditional computing.

The earliest mainframes, medium-sized computers, PCs in the 1980s, and small computer rooms in the 1990s all belong to traditional computing.

A major feature of traditional computing is resource consolidation. In other words, the software and hardware computing resources that these computers can use are fixed.

The CPU, memory, and hard disk can only be used as much as they are installed. The resources are less (Insufficient performance), you need to spend more money to buy. If there are too many resources (excess performance), no refund will be given.

It is precisely because traditional computing lacks sufficient flexibility in resource allocation that the concept of “cloud computing” is proposed.

In simple terms, compared with traditional computing, the resource acquisition method of cloud computing has changed from “buying” to “renting.”

All the software and hardware computing resources we mentioned earlier can all be rented. It is the cloud service provider that provides resource rental services.

Basic features of cloud computing

The “rent” of cloud computing is very different from our usual renting and car rental. It has three notable features:


1. Resource pooling

Most of the computing resources of cloud computing are not single physical resources. In other words, you will not rent a lone physical server. (except bare metal servers)

Most cloud computing resources are pooled resources. What is pooling? Pooling is based on physical resources and encapsulated into virtual computing resources through a software platform, which is what we often call virtualization.

Virtualization

The advantage of virtualization is to make computing resources easier to choose and to call more flexible.

2. Elastic scaling

Cloud computing computing resources can be paid on demand. You can rent as much as you want. The configuration is customizable.

It’s a bit like eating mala Tang. You can take whatever you want and take as much as you want. Finally pay by the amount.

Spicy Tang

If you need better configuration due to business growth in the later period, you can add more money and buy more resources.

The process of increasing resources is basically a smooth upgrade. Minimize the impact on the business as much as possible, and there is no need for business migration. Just like the computer you are using now, if the hard disk is upgraded from 1TB to 2TB, the next order will be completed, without the need to replace the machine, or even to restart. (You still need to stop the machine to upgrade the CPU or memory.)

If the load of a certain business drops, you can also choose to shrink elastically, reduce the configuration, and save money.

3. Safe and reliable

Professional people do professional things. Traditional computing requires self-purchased hardware, self-built computer room, and self-maintenance. This is a huge investment of capital and manpower.

And cloud computing, from a physical point of view, all computing resources areConverged in a large Internet data center (IDC), where there are strict security, earthquake-resistant buildings, safe power supply, and a very comprehensive disaster tolerance design And emergency solutions can better protect computing resources and will not easily interrupt services.

IDC Data Center

In terms of software, cloud computing service providers have more professional technical teams and more mature technical reserves, which can better protect computing resources from being invaded or destroyed.

The distributed architecture adopted by most cloud computing services enables computing resources to withstand a load far exceeding that of a single-point architecture. The multi-node service mode is also convenient to serve users in different areas.

What services does cloud computing include?

As we said earlier, cloud computing provides resource services, mainly including hardware resources and software resources.

Do you know how many resources are there?

Taking the service provided by a certain domestic cloud computing service provider as an example, Mr. Xiaozao compiled a product table as follows:

A simple statistics, a total of 7 categories, 149 projects, fully demonstrated the diversity of the current cloud computing business, but everything you can think of, has been made into cloud services for “rental.”

Let’s take a brief look at what these categories do.

1. Flexible calculation

This is the most important type of cloud computing service, which can actually be understood as renting a server with flexible configuration. Support heterogeneous computing, you can rent CPU computing power, you can also rent GPU, FPGA computing power. The computing power ranges from entry-level to high-performance.

Virtualization and container technologies that realize elastic computing have also been separated separately for “rental”.


2. Database

Needless to say, there are everything from structured databases to unstructured databases, from open source databases to private technology databases.

3. Storage<