What is Cloud?
Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence and more—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.
The Cloud Provider Company provides your Organization the cloud based Virtual Infrastructure: virtual servers or virtual machines (VMs) that are interconnected together using a virtual network. All the virtual infrastructure is offered with contract and charges are applied on a monthly basis depending the resources you consume. On the VMs you may want to run your own applications full stack. in a different way, you may consume an offered service like for example the MySQL database that is offered from the Cloud Provider. In that case you just setup your database without having to plan/install/maintain the MySQL server – simply consume the MySQL Service. Provider may also offers monitoring of your virtual infrastructure that you can use in order to track your expenses.
Why to migrate on the Cloud?
Operational Cost reduction / You do not have to buy equipment, you just use the virtual cloud infrastructure provided by the Cloud Provider.
You use the virtual cloud infrastructure as long time as you want and you can discontinue your contract anytime.
Operational cost is paid by the Cloud Provider and you don not have to renew equipment.
You use as many resources you need on demand without having to buy equipment. If for example during the Xmass period your MySQL Cluster runs to the limits, you can just add more MySQL servers to the cluster. In a later time you just can delete the redundant servers!
Cloud Provider offers Services you might want to use, for example MySQL, PostgreSQL, HTTP and Application Servers that can be used in order to setup your services. The setup and maintenance of the Services is provided by the Cloud Provider while you have to setup you applications on top of them. Doing so, you save time and operational costs since you do not setup everything but only your own applications.
Provider gives you the tool to monitor your resource consumption, so you know anytime the charges that will be applied to the end of the month. In this case you can plan your resource usage and control your operational expenses.