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Infrastructure as a service is the most basic type of cloud computing services, allowing users to rent IT infrastructure.

FREMONT, CA: Cloud computing may be defined as a collection of various types of hardware and software that collaborate over the internet to provide various computing services to end-users as an online service. Users can access data and use programs in the cloud from any device connected to the internet.

The capacity to scale elastically is one of the advantages of cloud computing services. That implies delivering the proper amount of IT resourcesfor example, more or less computing power, storage, and bandwidthat the right time and from the right geographic place in cloud language. Majority of cloud computing services are on-demand and self-service, which means that even massive amounts of computing resources may be provisioned in minutes, usually with only a few mouse clicks, offering enterprises a lot of flexibility and relieving capacity planning strain.

What Are the Many Types of Cloud Services?

Cloud computing services can be classified into four categories, or the cloud computing stack, which build on top of one another:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): IaaS is the most basic type of cloud computing services, allowing users to rent IT infrastructure. A cloud provider's servers and virtual machines, for example. Pay as peruse is the basis of LaaS.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): The PaaS category allows end-users to rent or buy an on-demand environment for software creation, testing, delivery, and management. PaaS is built in such a way that it allows for the rapid development of web and mobile apps. Without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, networking, and databases that are essential for growth.

Software as a Service (SaaS): SaaS refers to cloud computing services, enabling end-users to obtain software programs on-demand and on a subscription basis via the internet. End-users can utilize SaaS to host and administer software applications and underlying infrastructure and perform maintenance tasks such as software upgrades and security patches.

FaaS (functions as a service): FaaS is the next step up from PaaS, allowing end-users to have a fully insulated stack for their code. A user can upload a chunk of code and have it triggered by a pay as peruse event.

See Also:Top Cloud Companies

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The Many Types of Cloud Computing Services - CIOReview

Editors Note: This story is part of a 10-part series that examines life after the third-party cookie. Visit this interactive graphic outlining the full series here.

At the end of August, Erin Yasgar concluded that Google really wanted her to attend its upcoming cloud conference.

Yasgar, a practice lead for marketing and agency strategy at Prohaska Consulting, was being pestered in that way sought-after people will find familiar: Getting multiple emails a week, reminding her of the date, just checking in.

This felt unusual. The cloud side of Googles business had previously shown little interest in agencies or marketers in general.Google is actively courting the marketers [for its cloud business], Yasgar said.

As the media industry begins to turn itself upside down before Google ends its support of third-party cookies, large cloud tech companies including Google, Amazon and Microsoft are using the upheaval as an opportunity to try and grow their cloud businesses.

In taking third-party cookies out of digital advertisings equation, Google has forced advertisers and publishers alike to focus on their own first-party data to an unprecedented degree. Without cookies to fall back on for targeting or measurement, they will need to bring more data into more clean rooms for matching. As the importance of e-commerce continues to swell, marketers will need to do more to tie their ad data to other kinds of data typically walled off in different corners of their organizations. And as advertisers, as well as publishers, reshuffle their always-on ad spending strategies, so will the need to use artificial intelligence to spot pattern growths too.

Signs of these growing needs are already visible. For example, searches for customer data platform software more than doubled last year, according to data from the business software marketplace G2.

But at the most developed end of the spectrum, most of these needs can be solved by cloud infrastructure and computing services. And its largest purveyors are ready to pounce.

They never had to understand unknown, or anonymous people. They were just buying return on ad spend through an agency.

David Novak, the co-chair of the data and marketing practice at Prophet

As you get into the billions and above in revenue, its becoming one of the highest priorities, said David Novak, the co-chair of the data and marketing practice at Prophet. Those largest firms, Novak said, are driving a very tech-centric view of how to gain customer understanding that they didnt have a few years ago.

They [marketers] never had to understand unknown, or anonymous people. They were just buying return on ad spend through an agency.

Today, Novak and Yasgar see large organizations instead focused on trying to drive personalized interactions with their customers across many disparate surfaces; sharing data not just across their own different parts internally but with growing numbers of strategic partners externally.

All of that makes the need for strong cloud infrastructure more important.

That need for the flexibility [of data], and the tech that CMOs need to deal with the identity graphs, cloud computing supports all of it, Yasgar said. All the infrastructure thats needed, what both sides of the coin need, is absolutely set to grow.

While the cloud providers are most interested in the largest marketers and media companies at the moment, this shift seems likely to spread to smaller publishers too, some, such as Amazon, are positioning themselves in a way that could hook even mid- and long-tail publishers into their clouds.

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For Amazon, Google and Microsoft combined, cloud computing is already a $100 billion business. Timothy K. Horan, a cloud and communications analyst at Oppenheimer

In the great cloud battle, media would be a minor theater of war. Cloud computing is already a $100 billion business for Amazon, Google and Microsoft combined, and it is growing by more than $30 billion annually, said Timothy K. Horan, a cloud and communications analyst at Oppenheimer.

Securing the largest advertisers and publishers might amount to a single-digit percentage of their cloud revenues. Maybe its hundreds of millions of revenue in a couple years, Horan said. Theyre always pursuing these kinds of things, but its a minor product [in that context].

But even if each individual marketer is small potatoes to the cloud purveyors themselves, committing to one kind of infrastructure or another represents a profound decision for most of their customers.

Were talking about something that is incredibly complex, Yasgar said. Theres always that decision of, Do I go all in on one vendor, or do I go best in class and match in my stack?

Viewed from one angle, all of that complexity, as well as the significant amount of time and investment needed to commit to a cloud provider and strategy, could create the kind of oligopoly that currently rules the digital advertising market: If marketers have to work more closely with one another, the incentive to use shared cloud infrastructure grows strong enough that it may force the largest marketers and publishers and agencies into the hands of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, freezing out independent services such as Snowflake.

But others say that complexity may have the opposite effect, essentially buying time for competitors, which have made separate in-roads with marketers, to develop their cloud offerings to better suit these larger needs.

It could give them [Adobe and Salesforce] a dark horse position, Novak said. They are already working with marketers, hand in hand.

For now, smaller marketers and publishers are mostly relying on agencies or less sophisticated software to handle these problems. But if you squint while looking at the moves that cloud providers such as Amazon are making, its possible to see them as part of the foundation of a much larger cloud-based services business for them.

The companys publisher services division, APS, already provides a server-side tool that allows them to manage ad requests. It is currently building an ad tech services marketplace inside APS as well, which would allow publishers to run many of the revenue-boosting (but often site-slowing) services on Amazon servers, rather than theirs.

That basket of services could represent the strong foundation of a product that most publishers would have to at least consider subscribing to, sources say. It could sweeten the deal further by using its dominant market position to secure preferential pricing for APS customers.

Amazon may not wind up building out that infrastructure to target smaller publishers. But the shadow of Amazons cloud ambitions already color the conversations it has, say sources at multiple publishers who work with Amazon, who asked not to be identified while discussing a key business partner.

All they care about is their cloud business, one said.

More:
Cloud computing is the new frontier for companies looking to get ahead of Google - Digiday

After a long race, you arrive hot and breathless at the finishing line, only to find your biggest competitor is already there, cool and relaxed, saying: Welcome to the club!

At the risk of seeming facetious, this is roughly what is happening right now in the world of cloud computing solutions and operating systems.

Microsoft recently announced the upcoming global release on October 5, of Windows 11, the next iteration of its operating system for desktops and laptops, now six years old.

It promises multiple tweaks and improvements which make multitasking and shifting seamlessly from platform to platform a cinch.

New Artificial Intelligence-powered widgets help users personalise their desktops with custom feeds, to an extent never possible before. Like Windows 10, the new edition will be a free download for legal users but they are not likely to be invited to upgrade till sometime in 2022.

New desktop and portable PCs bought later this year, may come pre-installed with Windows 11 or with a free assured upgrade of Windows 10 (Details here).

Microsoft preceded the announcement of Windows 11 with a curiously timed announcement: that 10 years after it converted its office suite into Office 365, a cloud-based pay-and-use utility, it was going to do likewise with its operating system, Windows.

Windows 365: anytime-anywhere computing

Windows 365 is said to be a cloud service that delivers a new way to experience Windows, streaming personalised apps, settings, and content from the Microsoft cloud to any device.

Users select Windows 11, once it is generally available, along with a configuration of processing power, storage and memory that suits their needs.

They then access their Cloud PC through a native application or web browser on any device, from anywhere with an internet connection.

Microsoft is touting this as a new working model in the New Normal of Work-From-Home or, at any rate, Work-From-Anywhere: Remote workers flip the lid on their laptop, bootup the family workstation or clip a keyboard onto a tablet, launch a native app or modern web browser and login to their Windows 365 account. From there, their Cloud PC appears with their background, apps, settings and content just as they left it when they were last there in the office, at home or a coffee shop!

Such smooth working comes at a price. Your devices (you can work on up to 5) need to have 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. It then costs a minimum of Rs 2,410 per user, per month, to subscribe to Windows 365 and that can amount to a pretty pile of cash even for a small office of a dozen users (check plans here).

But it is in sync with current industry trends that make you subscribe to popular business software rather than buy it outright making you pay again and again for perpetuity.

Already there: Googles Chrome OS

While Windows 11 will continue to be free for existing users of a legal version of Windows 10 or earlier, at the least, till its support ends on 14 October 2025, home users are already having to pay Rs 4,899 annually for a single user and Rs 6,199 for up to six users in a family, if they want to access what used to be the Microsoft Office suite for document creation, presentation and spreadsheet: what is now Microsoft 365, the cloud-based service, with 1 terabyte of cloud storage free.

This is where Google is able to make a Godfather-like offer you cant refuse, because its alternative operating system and office suite is free-to-use for lay users.

ChromeOS, the operating system that Google created for a predominantly always-online user, is 10 years old this year. Most of us installed ChromeOS as a second string to a primary desktop or laptop OS like Windows.

But over years, its USP being lite, lean-and-mean saw it creeping on to more and more desktops, laptops and of course Android phones.

But a laptop with Chrome as the only OS? That looked like a case of living dangerously.

Not so. At least, not for todays mobile-first generation which is used to switching smoothly from smartphone to laptop or desktop multiple times a day and wants a consistent experience: carrying on a task on phone that one had initiated on a laptop or vice-versa.

The other fact of life that underpins a Chromebook as Chrome-driven devices like tablets, laptops, are known is uninterrupted Internet. If your mobile phone has a data plan for Internet, it is easy enough to rejig it into a private hotspot so that you can use the same data plan to access the Internet on your nearby laptop.

Possibly to smoothen the learning curve for a laptop that runs only on Chrome, Google uses the term confusingly and interchangeably for the Operating System as well as for its free browser that comes by default on any handphone powered by Android... even the logos are identical.

Once you have continuous access to the Internet, it no longer makes sense to use the laptop or tablets real estate to store heavy office applications or even to store the data or video files you save.

It can all be done in the cloud which is where Google has put all its free-to-use office and productivity apps: Google Docs, G Suite, Google Drive, Google Workspace, Gmail, Google Playstore This means you can get away with a minimally powered platform with just enough memory and local storage to run all these applications after going online.

Chromebooks: Is there life without Windows?

Asus has recently launched a quartet of Chromebooks and the smallest and lightest of them is the Chromebook C223 which I have been using for a couple of weeks.

It is arguably the cheapest fully-loaded laptop you can buy today which also raises the question: Can you live without Windows?

Weighing just 1 kg and with a 11.6-inch diagonal LED screen with a HD resolution that approximates to 720p, the C223 has a 38 watt-hour battery that is good to go for a full working day of about 10 hours.

These days, video conferences have become central to our work style and the 720p HD camera and stereo speakers are more than adequate for Skype, Zoom, Cisco-Webex or whatever.

Like all Chromebooks, the C223 uses solid state storage, for a quick start and faster data exchange and 32 GB storage is just about enough provided you live online using only cloud storage; As long as you have no issues being a Google Guy all the way, you will be surprised how much you can do without a lot of hardware-installed tools and apps.

The laptop is fuelled by an Intel Celeron N3350 with 2 MB of cache and this is just about adequate to perform most office functions. Ultimately all Chromebooks stand or fall depending on how good your Internet connection is.

After a fortnight using only the C223 for all my work, I have to admit: yes; you can do your basic office computing without Windows but there is a learning curve. Considering its very light build, the Asus Chromebook C223 is fairly light on purse at an affordable Rs 17,999.

By eliminating Windows and the Microsoft Office suite, the makers are able to shave off at least Rs 10,000- Rs 15,000 from the asking price of a similarly sized laptop.

Welcome to the new club of always-on-Internet cloud computing!

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Upcoming Windows 11 Launch Is Part Of Push To Cloud Computing But Isn't Google's Chrome Already There? - Swarajya

Conventional wisdom holds that a businesss carbon footprint is generated within its own facilities and operations. The truth is that, if a company wants to cut emissions, it must focus on the real culprit its supply chain. Today, experts understand that vendors generate the majority of any companys emissions, which means smart organizations are looking outward as well as inward.

Cloud computing and data centres have become core global infrastructure the roads and bridges of the internet economy. But theyve also become a significant driver of carbon emissions, responsible for an estimated 1.8% of US electricity consumption and the plurality of emissions for many tech companies.

And as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other cloud providers compete with each other on price, speed, security and, of late, AI offerings, energy efficiency has been just an operational concern not a customer demand.

Thats about to undergo a change which will lead to a multi-trillion-dollar competition to provide cleaner cloud services.

After all, the environment is becoming a major focus for corporate governance as we enter a critical decade for climate change. Regulators from around the world are beginning to demand that major corporations step up efforts to reduce emissions. This pressure for climate governance will be felt across supply chains not least the cloud and data centre supply chain.

Simply put, the emissions of cloud providers are the emissions of the businesses that use them. Businesses can take a number of proactive steps to address these concerns, from the simple step of switching to data centres on lower carbon electricity grids to the more complex task of transitioning major parts of their business to a cleaner cloud service.

Cloud providers are aware of the pressure theyll face from regulators and businesses, with the top three already setting goals to deploy renewable energy and reach net zero emissions. Google is working towards 24/7 clean power for its data centres; Amazon is shooting for 100% renewables by 2025; and Microsoft is leading the way on transparency for its cloud customers. But these targets are just the beginning. Corporate demand to meet aggressive carbon reduction goals will set off the next big cloud race: the race to zero carbon.

To be sure, cloud services are almost certainly more energy efficient than privately operated data centres, so companies that have moved from on-premise or self-operated data centres to any of the major cloud providers have already reduced their carbon footprint. In fact, the transition to cloud computing between 2021 and 2024 should prevent at least 629 million metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, according to market research company IDC. But this doesnt mean that all cloud services are built equal and perfectly clean.

Start by knowing where you stand

The scale of cloud carbon emissions has long gone underreported. Until a few years ago, very few cloud customers had the means of measuring, understanding or managing their true contributions.

When counting cloud emissions, you have to take into account all particulars, like instance type, chip brand, cloud provider and geographic region. Companies should think about emissions in two categories: the direct emissions from the electricity necessary to operate a data centre, and the indirect emissions from manufacturing hardware and other operations to deliver cloud services.

Companies should start by getting a handle on emissions from their cloud provider in both categories. And cloud providers should make it easier by being transparent about their electricity grids and upstream emissions.

The more savvy and transparent corporations get about their carbon footprint, the more pressure theyll place on major cloud providers to accelerate the road to zero carbon.

This starts by deploying zero-carbon power for data electricity consumption. The top cloud providers have started down this road, but theyve made uneven progress. Google has already matched 100% of its energy consumption with renewables, and is setting an even more ambitious target to get to 24/7 clean power. Microsoft is slower on renewables deployment, but has set an admirable standard on transparency in disclosing emissions to cloud customers. Amazon is lagging its peers, working towards 100% renewable energy by 2025. In all cases, pressure from customers will drive the cloud providers to move faster.

Its an annual meeting featuring top examples of public-private cooperation and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies being used to develop the sustainable development agenda.

It runs alongside the United Nations General Assembly, which this year features a one-day climate summit. This is timely given rising public fears and citizen action over weather conditions, pollution, ocean health and dwindling wildlife. It also reflects the understanding of the growing business case for action.

The UNs Strategic Development Goals and the Paris Agreement provide the architecture for resolving many of these challenges. But to achieve this, we need to change the patterns of production, operation and consumption.

The World Economic Forums work is key, with the summit offering the opportunity to debate, discuss and engage on these issues at a global policy level.

The next chapter of the zero-carbon cloud will be indirect emissions: encouraging cloud companies to zero out the carbon of manufacturing and disposing of server hardware, and operating the rest of their cloud business. Microsoft is aiming for net zero on these emissions by 2030; Amazon by 2040; Google has not yet set a clear target. We need all companies to get to true net zero fast.

Just as cybersecurity and data privacy concerns have forced corporations to take ownership of their threat landscape and data liabilities, climate governance will change how the biggest businesses in the world select and use cloud services. There are trillions of dollars at stake as cloud providers rush to offer zero-carbon emissions, and the race has already begun.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The next big cloud competition is the race to zero emissions - World Economic Forum

Any way you look at it, the data and compute demands of the National Institutes of Health are dauntingly large. NIH is composed of 27 institutes or centers. These encompass some 110 laboratories. The agencys distributed research network moves six petabytes of data daily. NIH also funds research at some 2,500 universities and medical centers, spending more than $40 billion each year.

From an information technology standpoint, NIH is all about big data and big scientific computing. Given the size and scope of data and applications, coupled with the worldwide collaborative nature of NIH activities, its no wonder commercial cloud computing has become a large and essential part of the agencys IT approach.

Much of the cloud planning and contracting falls to NIHs Center for Information Technology. Its chief information officer, Andrea Norris, sorted it all out when she spoke at Federal News Networks Cloud Exchange.

A lot of what we support are in big data, scientific data repositories, Norris said. Thats a big chunk of where our technology and data resources are.

Moreover, that data, ultimately paid for with tax dollars, belongs to the public.

A lot of our data is public access, public domain. We make it accessible to the general public, and especially, of course, to researchers around the world, Norris said. We are a big supporter of public access data. And for science, we believe open access is the way to accelerate discovery. And so we have very large programmatic and discipline-specific data repositories with computational tools and job aids, where researchers come to conduct their science.

Which, perhaps not surprisingly, makes the cloud a logical option for hosting all of the data and tools the institutes encompass. Norris explained that, in fact, a cloud migration is exactly what the NIH Center for Information Technology has been doing for the last several years. Cloud adoption falls under a program called the STRIDES Initiative, which itself is a component of an agency-wide data science strategic plan.

STRIDES stands for science and technology research infrastructure for discovery, experimentation and sustainability. NIH, under STRIDES, has established relationships with three major commercial cloud services providers: Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Contracts Norris termed them relationships with the companies has brought affordable costs to the individual institutes and to the research grantees throughout academia to encourage cloud adoption.

Norris said the arrangements have worked.

In just the last two years, STRIDES has resulted in more than 110 petabytes of scientific data thats 112,600 terabytes moving into the cloud environments.

Our funded researchers have used more than 100 million compute hours in the cloud, Norris said. Weve trained more than 4,000 researchers in how to use the cloud. Training efforts cover everything from basics to advanced and, more importantly, how to do biomedical computing in the cloud. Really, how to do the kind of work we need to see our researchers do.

And were saving money because the discounts accrue to the collective research environment, Norris added. The more we move, the better the discounts are.

Attractive as the pricing model is, the STRIDES program has also helped NIH foster the health mission itself. Norris cited the example of when the genetic sequence of the COVID-19 virus was finished back in January. The arrangements let NIH instantly share the information worldwide, sparking the global research drive into vaccines.

Thus, the cloud is literally changing the way that we do science, Norris said.

From an architectural standpoint, Norris said, the default methodology for avoiding constant data download costs is to establish collaborative workspaces in the cloud that house analytics, utilities and visualization tools. That is, the approach brings the compute to the data, rather than the other way around.

Thats the model were encouraging, Norris said. Some of the data sets are just too large; you cant do it any other way.

For how the STRIDES Initiative and the bend towards cloud computing plays in a specific instance, Cloud Exchange also heard from Alastair Thomson, the CIO of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Thomson said cloud-hosted research has been taking place at the NHLBI for more than three years. Typical, if on the larger side, is a genomic project for precision medicine involving 180,000 participants. The project population is notable for being one of the most racially diverse samples ever. The genomic data of the group, Thomson said, adds up to 3.8 petabytes.

The size makes the cloud a necessity.

To work with that data, you have to use it in the cloud, Thomson said. Without the cloud, youd be trying to download it. And over whatever broadband connection you have, 3.8 petabytes is going to take a while.

Thomson cited the STRIDES Initiative as crucial to the institutes work. An environment called the NHLBI BioData Catalyst, he explained, makes data available to researchers via Amazon and Google. The Catalyst, Thomson said, conforms to Federal Information Security Modernization Act requirements, and is FedRAMP Moderate. Therefore it is suitable to the medical data that entails stringent privacy regulations.

With wide access to the data, he said, researchers have made discoveries in several areas essential to reducing heart disease. By hosting the data and analytic tools in the cloud, researchers can more easily run fine-grained queries. That capability has produced real results in terms of understanding the variations among racial groups sensitivities to environmental conditions and treatments meaning that the sample diversity can produce fresh understanding thanks in part to cloud computing.

Fast cloud access to the genomic data, coupled with Web-interface search tools with semantic understanding, gives researchers the ability to do detailed studies far more quickly in the past. For example, a researcher looking for people with a certain body mass index who have had a heart attack, along with a control group, can assemble the needed data instantly from a search.

This is something that just setting up an environment to do this would take months for research, Thomson said. Now, you can just log in, and you can start doing it.

Plus, theres a positive budgetary impact from the cloud.

You can imagine that computing across that kind of data takes extensive compute resources, Thomson said. The elasticity of the cloud lets us spin up a large cluster of compute nodes, compute on them, do the analysis, and then shut them down again rather than having a massive data center thats sitting near us [operating] 20% or 30% of the time.

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Cloud Exchange: NIH and NHLBI are innovating through cloud services - Federal News Network