What is a cloud computing? | Ubuntu

Your submission was sent successfully! Close
Thank you for contacting us. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Close
You have successfully unsubscribed! Close
Thank you for signing up for our newsletter! In these regular emails you will find the latest updates about Ubuntu and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close
Your preferences have been successfully updated. Close notification
Please try again or file a bug report. Close
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over a network. In traditional data centers, compute, and storage resources used to be allocated manually by a dedicated IT team. In the cloud, this process is fully automated, leading to increased agility and significant cost savings.
Cloud computing is a de facto standard for modern data center implementation and a foundation for cloud-native application deployments. It is used by the majority of organizations worldwide, as it replaces the high upfront costs and management burdens of physical hardware with a scalable, pay-as-you-go model that accelerates innovation.
Get ready for cloud migration ›
The name "cloud computing" comes from a common practice of representing complex IT systems on diagrams as a cloud. Modern data centers are typically extremely complex, consisting of hundreds of racks, power devices, network devices, servers, storage arrays, cables, and many other components. The end user does not want to understand all these intricacies – they just want resources that can be consumed quickly and on demand. Cloud computing abstracts all these complexities, turning the data center into a resource rental store.
Cloud computing uses numerous technologies, including virtualization, containerization, and automation. At the heart of the cloud computing stack, there is cloud management software. This software manages compute, network, and storage resources distributed across the entire data center, aggregates them into pools, and enables on-demand provisioning of resource chunks through a self-service portal. End users can request those resources to be provisioned in the form of virtual machines (VMs) or containers.
People who are new to cloud computing often get confused with the cloud computing vs virtualization dilemma. Virtualization is a technology that divides the physical resources of a server, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), storage and network, into chunks. Those can further be aggregated into VMs, consisting of virtual resources and allocated to end users. Hardware virtualization, VM creation, and termination is handled by a dedicated software, firmware, or hardware component called a hypervisor.
In turn, cloud computing expands the capabilities provided by the hypervisor. The cloud software manages all the hypervisors and automates the VM provisioning process. Whenever a cloud user requests a VM with specific parameters through the self-service portal, the cloud software tries to find the least utilized hypervisor (unless configured otherwise), schedules VM creation on this hypervisor, and returns VM details back to the user. Furthermore, it automates the creation of other types of virtual resources, such as block storage devices, virtual networks, and more.
Compared to legacy IT infrastructure based on mainframes, blades, and “pet” servers, cloud computing transforms data centers into resource pools, providing end users with immediate access to hardware: physical or virtual. The primary benefits of cloud computing include:
In cloud computing, all resources are available on-demand. Users can get instant access to them whenever desired and terminate them when no longer needed.
In legacy IT infrastructure, the resource provisioning process takes days or even weeks due to numerous manual actions. In cloud computing environments, the resource provisioning process takes minutes, if not seconds.
Building a data center might take a lot of time. In turn, public clouds provide businesses with immediate access to theoretically infinite resources. This removes many constraints from developers and accelerates the time to market.
In traditional data centers, physical resources are owned by dedicated entities leading to sub-optimal resource consumption. In the cloud, all resources are shared and equally distributed, leaving no single server underutilized.
Cloud computing can deliver long-term cost savings for every organization. The cloud enables executives to focus on the business strategy, developers to focus on business applications, and IT staff to leverage automation rather than wasting time on manual processes.
While cloud computing brings a number of benefits, migrating to the cloud also entails a number of challenges. Those include:
While there are many migration-as-a-service tools available on the market which facilitate lift and shift migration, moving production workloads to the cloud might still be challenging. Fortunately, various cloud migration strategies exist which enable organizations to move to the cloud while ensuring the availability of their critical applications.
Even though it is possible to just lift and shift legacy workloads to the cloud, organizations often have to re-design their workloads in the long term to receive all the benefits of the cloud. Some take it as an opportunity to standardize on a cloud-native architecture, which leads to higher granularity, better scalability, and increased resiliency.
Moving all workloads and data to the cloud results in digital sovereignty risks. Moreover, in some parts of the world, it might be impossible due to local regulations. In response to this challenge, organizations can build their own private cloud, taking back control over privacy while benefiting from all the advantages that cloud computing brings.
Cloud computing proves to be the most economical way to run modern business applications. Therefore, it has been adopted by the majority of organizations all over the world. Ho