What exactly is cloud computing? What is the popular saying?

Cloud computing is a mode of increasing, using and delivering related services based on the Internet, which usually involves providing dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources through the Internet. Cloud is a metaphor of network and internet. In the past, cloud was often used to represent telecommunication networks, and later it was also used to represent the abstraction of the Internet and the underlying infrastructure. So cloud computing can even let you experience the computing power of 10 trillion times per second. Such a powerful computing power can simulate a nuclear explosion and predict climate change and market development trends. Users access the data center through computers, notebooks, mobile phones, etc. , and calculate according to your own needs.

Cloud computing has many definitions. What is cloud computing? There are at least 100 explanations. At this stage, it is generally accepted that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as a pay-per-use model. This model provides available, convenient and on-demand network access, and enters a configurable pool of computing resources (resources include networks, servers, storage, application software and services), which can be quickly provided through little management work or service providers.

The characteristics of cloud computing are as follows:

(1) Very large scale

"Cloud" has a considerable scale. Google cloud computing has more than 1 10,000 servers, and Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and other "clouds" have hundreds of thousands of servers. Enterprise private clouds generally have hundreds of servers. "Cloud" can give users unprecedented computing power.

(2) Virtualization

Cloud computing supports users to obtain application services at any place and using various terminals. The requested resources come from the "cloud" rather than a fixed tangible entity. The application runs somewhere in the cloud, but in fact, users don't need to know or worry about the specific location where the application runs. All we need is a notebook or a mobile phone, and we can achieve everything we need through network services, even such tasks as supercomputing.

(3) High reliability

"Cloud" adopts measures such as fault tolerance of multiple copies of data and isomorphic interchange of computing nodes to ensure high reliability of services. Using cloud computing is more reliable than using local computers.

(4) universality

Cloud computing is not specific to a particular application. With the support of cloud, ever-changing applications can be constructed, and the same cloud can support different applications at the same time.

(5) High scalability

The scale of the "cloud" can be dynamically expanded to meet the growing needs of applications and users.

(6) on-demand service

"Cloud" is a huge resource pool, which you can buy on demand; Clouds can be charged like tap water, electricity and gas.

(7) extremely cheap

Because the special fault-tolerant measures of "cloud" can use extremely cheap nodes to form a cloud, the automatic centralized management of "cloud" makes a large number of enterprises not have to bear the increasingly high cost of data center management, and the universality of "cloud" greatly improves the utilization rate of resources compared with the traditional system, so users can fully enjoy the low-cost advantage of "cloud", and often it takes only a few hundred yuan and a few days to complete tasks that used to take tens of thousands of yuan and months.

Cloud computing can completely change people's future lives, but at the same time, we should pay attention to environmental issues, so as to truly contribute to human progress, rather than simply upgrading technology.

(8) Potential dangers

Cloud computing services not only provide computing services, but also provide storage services. However, cloud computing services are currently monopolized by private institutions (enterprises), and they can only provide commercial credit. For government agencies and commercial organizations (especially commercial organizations with sensitive data such as banks), we should be vigilant when choosing cloud computing services. Once commercial users use cloud computing services provided by private organizations on a large scale, no matter how strong their technical advantages are, these private organizations will inevitably seize the whole society with the importance of "data (information)". For the information society, "information" is crucial. On the other hand, the data in cloud computing is confidential to users other than the data owner, but it is really not a secret to commercial organizations that provide cloud computing. All these potential dangers are important premises that commercial organizations and government agencies have to consider when choosing cloud computing services, especially those provided by foreign organizations.