Cloud and Cloud VPS, What’s The Difference?

Cloud and Cloud VPS, What’s The Difference? Hayden Smith explains it!

The cloud: it’s almost everywhere these days.  Music is in the cloud, movies in the cloud, tv in the cloud, books in the cloud, apps in the cloud, servers in the cloud…  It seems that almost everything is in the cloud apart from water vapour.  The cloud has become the marketeer’s shorthand for selling almost any form of remote IT service.  While there are different official definitions of cloud services, those are often dropped in favour of just the use of the word ‘cloud’.
The main forms of cloud that we usually see being sold are Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  Good examples of SaaS are Google’s Apps and Microsoft’s Office 365, in addition to Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management software.  There are a myriad of other SaaS examples out there, though the main factors they have in common is that the software is accessed remotely rather than locally installed, it tends to be billed on usage rather than arbitrary licensing, and replaces up-front cost with monthly payments.
A cloud model known as Platform as a Service (PaaS) sits between Infrastructure and Software.  It generally provides a scalable and distributed platform on which users can run their own software.  Examples of this is Microsoft’s Azure cloud (which can provide both IaaS and PaaS to customers) and Google’s App Engine.  Due to restrictions around which development languages and libraries these platforms allow, you can’t just run any software on these services and – due to restrictions around what each system allows – it is likely an application will need to be built for that specific service before deployment.
Cloud VPS comes under the heading of Infrastructure as a Service.  This is probably the most commonly used form of IaaS though storage, firewalls, load balancers or other forms of traditional infrastructure components also qualify as IaaS when sold in this model.  Mostly any additional infrastructure components will be tacked on to a service involving some form of cloud server.  The cloud VPS itself consists of a Virtual Private Server that runs within a cloud infrastructure.  This virtual server acts, to all intents and purposes, as a dedicated server to the user and the operating system. The difference between this and a dedicated server is that the resources available to the server can be scaled as and when the user wishes.  Unlike a traditional VPS, a cloud VPS can benefit from the advantages of the underlying cloud infrastructure such as the ability to ‘failover’ to other hardware in the cloud should the underlying hardware that the VPS is currently using fails.  This means that rather than being offline for an indeterminate amount of time while your VPS provider makes repairs to the underlying hardware, a cloud VPS your server could be online on other hardware before the provider even gets a chance to look at the faulty hardware.
So while cloud can be used as a somewhat generic term to describe a number of remote-based systems and applications, a cloud VPS is a defined product within that broader terminology.  As a parallel to a dedicated server or traditional VPS, a cloud VPS is a product that may require certain skills to run as you are provided with a server with a basic  operating system.  So if you are generally looking for cloud solutions without considering running your own software on a server that you manage, then this may not be the solution for you, but if you were looking at a dedicated server or traditional VPS then the advantages of a cloud VPS may be something you’ll want to consider.
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