How Cloud Computing Works

is Jonathan Strickland. Hello from the cloud. So we were going to talk about cloud computing today, right we're calling this cloud computing one oh one because the term is reaching saturation in the tech world, and if you're not in the tech world, you might be confused as to what all this talk about cloud computing is is in regards to and and not to mention the other terms

that pop up. Sometimes they're used in place of cloud computing, and sometimes they seem to be differentiated from cloud computing. We're gonna try and uh and muddy the one, I mean, clear everything up for you. We're gonna we're gonna give

our definitive explanation of cloud computing. Well, to start with, I think what maybe what we should do is just give you a the most basic overview of the entire thing, which is basically what we're talking about doing is not having everything you do be run on the computer on your desktop, you're actually allowing somebody else to uh maybe store information or host applications. It sort of depends on on a lot of different things. You know, how you're going to be using it and what you're going to

be doing. But that's essentially it that you're actually sharing some part of the computing process with a network of other computers. That's correct, and and most of us are doing this in some form already, or many of us are anyway. If you have any sort of email web based email application such as a hotmail or Yahoo mail or Gmail, any of those, that's sort of a that's a kind of cloud computing. You are accessing your email, sending email, storing email all on someone else as computers.

You're you're accessing it through your browser, but the actual information and applications live on computers that belong to someone else there in the cloud. So that's what that means. If you ever hear the information is stored in the cloud somewhere, that means it's living on servers that belong to a certain company or certain certain organization, uh that provide these services. So that's like cloud storage. Then cloud storage would be if you were to save it on

someone else's servers. Okay, well, so then if you are using a web based word processor program like Google Docs or UM like Adobe's um buzzword, then that's actually cloud computing. Then yes, because you're using an application, you're doing everything on the web, but the the network, the cloud is handling the actual computing power. That's right. The only thing that your computer is really handling is to keep your browser going and whatever other applications you happen to have

on in the background. But the horsepower is being provided by this this cloud. Now, there are some other terms that do pop up when you're talking about cloud computing that sometimes are confusing. Uh. Those include grid computing and utility computing. Now, grid computing often is used interchangeably, but sometimes it's meant more as a way of adding processing

power to an application. So we're talking here about let's say you have a really, really big computing job that's going to take one computer thousands of hours to complete. Grid computing would use a grid of computers and break that job up into parts, and each computer would work on a part, and when it completed, it would send that part back to some administrative computer and then eventually you could reassemble all these pieces to make the whole.

That's grid computing, So that could be like a setting at home or folding at home. Basically, these are shared computing projects where people who are doing research can send

out chunks of information. They have so much that they can't do it themselves, so they send it to uh out to individuals like you or me, and they use their home computers to share in the computing power and send back the chunk of data once it's been processed, right, and and then utility computing is more about charging people to use this kind of uh, these kind of resources, whether it's processing power or storage. UH. You're you're putting in a metered rate for people to log in and

take advantage of these resources. Sometimes we refer to that also as a software as a service. That's more about let's say that you have a word processing application on the web that's really really good. UH, you might want to charge people to use that. That would be using that software as a service. You're providing a service for people, but they don't actually get that software. They can access it over the interne at, but they don't get a copy of it on their own. Computer. So that's what

utility computing is. So basically what we're talking about then is not having to lug your computer home every day, because you should be able to access the same information, the same programs, anywhere, any time, from any computer that has access to the Internet. That's correct. Yes, it's supposed to really free us up. It's also kind of going back to the old model of the supercomputer. Well that's uh, it's kind of funny how things end up full circle,

I guess sometimes. All right, Well, you can read more about this. We have a whole suite of articles how cloud computing works, how grid computing works, how shared computing works, and their links to many many others online right now at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the rein Into two thousand and twelve camera.

It's ready, are you