Hi, I am surprising with current trend for Cloud Computing, but can you tell me waht is the difference between cloud computing vs server we buy (i.e. vps or dedicated server) thanks Nilesh
Big difference, cloud shared hosting is much more reliable than a single hosted server. Cloud is more expensive in some cases though.
In a nutshell, cloud hosting will allow you to be entirely flexible on resources, adding just the required amount of resources to your server. It's just like dedicated server but with flexibility included. A dedicated server has hard limits on resources. Yuo ran out of disk, add a new one. Cloud hosting/servers are usually part of a large infrastructure setup, which is much more reliable than a single server (SAN/NAS for storage etc.)
Depending on your goals and needs, each approach, shared, dedicated, cloud or VPS has its benefits. In general, I find cloud and VPS to be very similar as they are offered by most providers. In fact, many VPS vendors use cloud technologies on the backend. VPS will quickly go the way of the cloud. One major issue with cloud is that it is a multi-tenant, shared solution -- unless you build your own cloud. As such, you are not in direct control of the infrastructure. This may impact things such as disaster recovery, backups, scalability and flexibility. Also the "fencing" between different tenants on a shared cloud infrastructure is not 100%. So like shared hosting, though to a much lower extent, the actions of others could impact your applications. My guide to this question is to focus on your business needs. What are your uptime, support and growth requirements. What are the risks of being in a shared cloud and having it go down? How do you port your application to another cloud solution. With some VPS or dedicated options, porting to another provider is easy. This may not be true of a cloud deployment. Portability, reliability, scalability, and elasticity (scale up/down) are all important things to consider. Once you have a good handle on these, then start on the technical requirements. From there, you can begin to hone in the solution that is right for you. In my work, I am a fan of the hybrid module -- run core assets on dedicated hardware and then use VPS/Cloud type services to provide scalability. For example, many of our clients run their databases on dedicated hardware while serving up static content from the cloud. This hybrid approach is very powerful and provides some of the best of both dedicated and cloud-based application delivery frameworks.
Very nice post! You are right, lots of Cloud based systems are running on the same platform, for example Cirtix Xenserver.