Cloud Computing and Spiders Essay Example

1. Define cloud computing and identify the business benefits of cloud computing
The term cloud computing has its basis on cloud drawings that were utilized in the past when representing telephone networks. Cloud computing can be described as internet based computing whereby servers which are virtually shared offer infrastructure, software, devices, platform, other resources as well as hosting to customers on the basis of pay-as-you-use. In the cloud computing model, all information is offered as a service. This means that users are able to access available services on the internet cloud with no need of possessing prior knowledge on the management of IT resources involved. Cloud computing has significant business benefits. Users are able to give more attention to their key business processes instead of trying to gain know-how on resources required in the management of these processes. Also, customers of cloud computing have no ownership of the physical infrastructure but instead rent the utilization from third-party providers. As such, they avoid huge costs since they only pay for resources used, thus reducing running costs.
2. Discuss the use of spiders to enable user searches of the Web
A document has to be found before a search engine can display where the document or file is. In order to get information on the many web pages, search engines uses special software robots that are known as spiders. Spiders are used to build lists of words that are found on the web sites. The process by which spiders build lists is known as web crawling. Usually, spiders take the content of a web page and generate key search words which make it possible for online users to obtain pages that they are searching for. Since these spiders have a lot of pages to build lists from, they start with lists of servers that are heavily used as well as popular pages. The spider indexes the words and follows every link that is found within the site. This way, they spread out across the portions of the web that are widely used.