Recently there has been a large push of a concept called “cloud computing”. Some of the largest companies ranging from Netflix to Spotify have been moving to the cloud and it just might be a good thing.
What is this “cloud computing” thing?
Before I go into what cloud computing, we have to understand where we came from. In the “old days” when a company wanted to expose their applications and services to the Internet they needed to buy physical hardware to set up servers (computer specialized for specific computing workloads) which consisted of processors, motherboards, ram, hard drives, racks to hold these things, and so on.
Not only did companies need to buy the physical hardware they needed to pay for the electricity and cooling for this hardware which could get very, very expensive. What made matters worse is that even if the company’s application was not as popular as they expected they would still need to pay for the servers even if they weren’t using them. If you were starting a company would you want all of these initial costs right off the bat? No, neither would I. That’s where cloud computing comes in.
I get it, computing was hard, but what’s “cloud computing” and how does it make computing easier?
Good question, cloud computing is the concept of taking all the physical hardware involved with serving an application to the internet and moving it outside of your company. In this case another company would own the servers and handle the maintenance, initial hardware costs, and electricity costs and you would only pay to rent these servers when you were using them and never when you don’t need them. Simple right? It’s just like renting an apartment, you pay for it only when you plan on living in it (except in the cloud there are usually no contracts to sign).
Cool, I don’t need to pay for servers, but it’s only for large companies right?
Nope, not at all. At the moment, there are 3 major cloud computing companies Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Each of these cloud computing companies/services/platforms have a free tier in which users can sign up for and run their servers for free within a certain limit. Go ahead and try them out, have fun!
Let me know in the comments below what you though of this post and if you tried out any of the cloud providers mentioned, what’s your opinion of them? What should I cover next?
ODP out!