Essential Cloud Computing Characteristics

As cloud computing matures commercially and technologically, companies are taking advantage of its many benefits. Familiarizing yourself with the essential cloud computing characteristics can help you maximize those benefits to grow and strengthen your business.

NIST’s 5 Essential Cloud Computing Characteristics

The National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) lists five essential characteristics of cloud computing: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. 

1. On-Demand Self-Service

With cloud computing, you can provision computing services, like server time and network storage, automatically. You won’t need to interact with the service provider. Cloud customers can access their cloud accounts through a web self-service portal to view their cloud services, monitor their usage, and provision and de-provision services.

2. Broad Network Access

Another essential cloud computing characteristic is broad network access. You can access cloud services over the network and on portable devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. A public cloud uses the internet; a private cloud uses a local area network. Latency and bandwidth both play a major role in cloud computing and broad network access, as they affect the quality of service. 

3. Resource Pooling

With resource pooling, multiple customers can share physical resources using a multi-tenant model. This model assigns and reassigns physical and virtual resources based on demand. Multi-tenancy allows customers to share the same applications or infrastructure while maintaining privacy and security. Though customers won't know the exact location of their resources, they may be able to specify the location at a higher level of abstraction, such as a country, state, or data center. Memory, processing, and bandwidth are among the resources that customers can pool.

4. Rapid Elasticity

Cloud services can be elastically provisioned and released, sometimes automatically, so customers can scale quickly based on demand. The capabilities available for provisioning are practically unlimited. Customers can engage with these capabilities at any time in any quantity. Customers can also scale cloud use, capacity, and cost without extra contracts or fees. With rapid elasticity, you won’t need to buy computer hardware. Instead,  can use the cloud provider's cloud computing resources.

5. Measured Service

In cloud systems, a metering capability optimizes resource usage at a level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service. For example, you can use a measured service for storage, processing, bandwidth, and users. Payment is based on actual consumption by the customer via a pay-for-what-you-use model. Monitoring, controlling, and reporting resource use creates a transparent experience for both consumers and providers of the service.

How Synopsys Leverages Cloud for Chip Design

Over the last decade, Synopsys has developed and optimized cloud-based workflows. To enable your full potential on the cloud, we have designed, pre-configured, and optimized automated actions for critical tasks like validation, regression, and correlation.

In 2022, we announced a new cloud-optimized EDA deployment model that provides unparalleled levels of chip design flexibility over a single-source, pay-as-you-go approach. We offer cloud-optimized design and verification software with pre-optimized infrastructure on Microsoft Azure so that you can take advantage of higher levels of interdependencies in chip design and verification.