In this video, we're going to talk about cloud computing.
Now most of us are familiar with the concept of running an operating system on a PC.
So as an example, I've got a Windows seven PC.
This is a Windows seven operating system installed on a physical server.
I'm connecting to that Windows PC using Microsoft Remote Desktop.
And I'm using a mac for these recordings.
So I've got a mac and I'm running Genius three as an example locally on my mac.
Now, in the same way that operating systems are installed on laptops and PCs, servers in the past
were physical PCs that you would install operating systems on and you would run applications on individual
physical servers.
So as an example, if you wanted a email server, you would order a physical server, you would install
the Windows operating system and then you would install exchange and configure exchange to give you
email.
If you wanted a file server, you would order a physical server, then you would install windows on
it and then you would store your files on that physical server.
If you wanted a web server, you would order a third server, install an operating system such as Linux
or Windows on that server, and then run a web server using IIS or Apache.
So in the past, companies had physical servers, and in many cases it was one server per function.
If you needed a file server, an email server, a web server, a database server, etc., you would
buy a physical server per application.
And if you needed more capacity, you would buy more physical servers.
Now, in many cases, that's inefficient.
Not all applications require all the memory and all the CPU on a physical PC all the time.
So for a number of years, there's been a trend to virtualization.
In other words, you've virtualize the operating system in what are called virtual machines rather than
running individual operating systems on bare metal or physical PCs.
You run operating systems in virtual machines and you host multiple servers virtually on a single physical
server.