Cloud Computing : What are cloud computing service providers and List of popular Cloud Service Providers

3. Cloud computing services providers

3.1 What are cloud computing service providers:

A cloud service provider is a third-party company offering a cloud-based platform, infrastructure, application or storage services. Companies typically have to pay only for the amount of cloud services they use, as business demands require.

Besides the pay-per-use model, cloud service providers also give companies a wide range of benefits.

  • Businesses can take advantage of scalability and flexibility by not being limited to physical constraints of on-premises servers, the reliability of multiple data centers with multiple redundancies.

  • customization by configuring servers to your preferences and responsive load balancing which can easily respond to changing demands. Though businesses should also evaluate security considerations of storing information in the cloud to ensure industry-recommended access and compliance management configurations and practices are enacted and met.

3.2 List of popular Cloud Service Providers

1. Amazon : Most of the Amazon services are LAAS. It offers through Amazon Web Services (AWS): Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon SQS. It claims to have 82 billion objects stored in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).

  • Amazon Web Service (AWS):It is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud-computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. The most central and well known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Amazon Web Services provide online services for other web sites or client-side applications. Most of these services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality that other developers can use.