Cloud computing and virtualization, including AWS, DigitalOcean | An Introduction to Cloud Hosting

Cloud computing and virtualization, including AWS, DigitalOcean | An Introduction to Cloud Hosting

What is “the Cloud”?
“The Cloud” is a common term that refers to internet-accessible servers that are available for public use, either through paid leasing or as part of a software or platform service. A cloud-based service can take many forms, including web hosting, file hosting and sharing, and software distribution. “The Cloud” can also refer to cloud computing, i.e., transparently spanning a task across multiple servers. Instead of running a complex process on a single powerful machine, cloud computing distributes the task across many smaller nodes.

How Virtualization Works
Cloud hosting environments are broken down into two main parts: the virtual servers that apps and websites can be hosted on, and the physical hosts that manage the virtual servers. Virtualization makes cloud hosting possible: the relationship between host and virtual server provides flexibility and scaling that are not available through other hosting methods.

Virtual Servers
The most common form of cloud hosting today is the use of a virtual private server, or VPS. A VPS is a virtual server that acts like a real computer with its own operating system. While virtual servers share resources that are allocated to them by the host, they are totally isolated in practice, so operations on one VPS won’t affect the others.

Virtual servers are deployed and managed by the hypervisor of a physical host. Each virtual server has an operating system installed by the hypervisor, that is available to the user. For practical purposes, a virtual server is identical in use to a dedicated physical server, though the a virtual server needs to share physical hardware resources with other servers on the same host.

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