13 Define Cloud Computing and its five characteristics

Hello students,

So far in Unit 2, we introduced the evolution of computing starting from enterprise computing to internet computing to saas computing to cloud computing.

We understood a little how SOA architecture that utilizes services helps to integrate different applications together. We encountered such integration in our assignment where we brought together three different microservices together even though they were loosely coupled.

Cloud has been using the Service Oriented computing architecture everywhere. Now the rest of the unit 2, we will dig deeper into understanding Cloud Computing


We begin with the definition of Cloud Computing. There are more than one way, people define Cloud Computing. Sometimes I say, its like renting a hardware and software over internet at anytime, anywhere.

Definition of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous (it means anywhere on any device), convenient (means it is easy to use), on-demand network access (means I can access its services anytime I wish) to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned (means to provide quicky) and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction

Do make a note of keywords in bold within the definition and understand its meaning specified in blue.


So cloud means, I can access compute, storage, network, software anywhere on any device as per my needs via a shared infrastructure with very less effort.

Five Characteristics of Cloud Computing

We study the specific characteristics of any cloud computing. As per NIST, cloud has five different characteristics

  • on-demand self service

    eg. I can get a machine with any configuration or a software environment whenever I want within minute. On AWS I can create a virtual machine using Elastic Compute Cloud service.

  • broad network access

    eg. I can access the machine or software environment from all over the world because cloud network. AWS cloud can be deployed and accessed from 22 geographical regions spread across 245 countries.

  • resource pooling

    eg. Just like one swimming pool is shared with many swimmers, in cloud one physical machine is shared with many virtual machines belonging to different customers. AWS has a rack full of around 50000 server per data center. There are atleast 80+ data centers spread across the world and each server is capable of supporting many virtual machines. All these infrastructure is like a swimmin pool which can be shared by all customers in the world. These feature of resource pooling is also called multi tenancy.

  • rapid elasticity

    eg. I can add or delete machines or increase my storage needs from 1 GB to 1 TB anytime I wish very easily. AWS EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing can elastically create a a duplicate copies of web server to manage a single website which has lot of visitors and when not needed, it can remove the unnecessary web server.

  • measured service

    eg. Cloud can measure every second of processor, storage, memory, network or just about anything that I use and it will charge me only for what I use, how much I use. If I use AWS Linux machine image for 5 hrs 3 seconds, I will be charged 5 hrs 3 seconds only. Except in certain scenarios such as AWS Windows machine image is charged per hour. It means if I use it for 15 mins, it is counted as 1 hour.

For more details, check the presentation and video of 2 CLOUD COMPUTING CHARACTERISTICS- PART 5 - SEM 3 - MSC 2

You may be asked a question in exam to define cloud and its characteristics. So do make a note of it.

Thank you.

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