What is a cloud service?
As part of this introduction, let us set the terminology to make sure we are all on the same page.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud as a technology that has the following five characteristics:
- On-demand self-service: Imagine you wish to start a blog, and you need computing resources. Instead of purchasing hardware and waiting for the vendor to ship it to your office and having to deploy software, the easier alternative can be a self-service portal, where you can select a pre-installed operating system and content management system that you can deploy within a few minutes by yourself.
- Broad network access: Consider having enough network access (the type that large internet service providers (ISPs) have) to serve millions of end users with your application.
- Resource pooling: Consider having thousands of computers, running in a large data center, and being able to maximize their use (from CPU, memory, and...
