Cloud computing possesses the following important characteristics:
Reliability:it can be improved by providing number of sites to the same service so that if one site is disaster other site would be available for business continuity.- Maintenance of cloud computing applications is quite easy because there is no need to deploy on each users system and can be accessed from various places.
- Performance is monitored, accordant, and loosely connected architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.
- Agility or quickness betters with users’ ability to re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
- Application programming interface (API) is same as the user interface by which humans access or interacts with the computers. But here instead of humans, interaction will be between cloud software and the computers. REST based API are used by the cloud computing systems.
- Cost is reduced when public cloud delivery model is used where the capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure. This is provided by a third-party to the lower barriers and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks.
- Users can access their systems using a web browser from any location via internet as cloud infrastructure is off-site and is provided by a third-party providers.
- Virtualization allows increase of sharing resources like servers and storage devices by the end users. Applications can easily be moved from one physical server to another.
- Multitenancy allows large number of users to share resources in an efficient way. Here the resources are shared in such a way that each one gets the amount it needs.
- Cloud service providers providing services such as email, applications, network or server service on demand self services with out human interactions with the number of service providers.
Broad network access, scalability and elasticity, security, resource pooling, consumption based billing are also some of the features of cloud computing systems.