What is cloud computing?
The best way to understand the cloud is to take the electricity supply analogy. To get electricity in your house, you just flip the switch on. Electric bulbs lighten your home and other appliances. In this case, you only pay for your electricity use when you need them. When you switch off the electric appliances, you are not paying anything. Now, imagine if you need to power a couple of appliances, and for that, you have to set up an entire powerhouse. It will be costly, right? as it involves the cost of maintaining the turbine, generator, and building the whole infrastructure. Utility companies make your job easier by supplying the electricity quantity you need. They maintain the entire infrastructure to generate electricity. They could keep the cost down by distributing electricity to millions of houses which helped them benefit from mass utilization. Now let’s come to cloud computing; while consuming cloud resources, you pay for IT infrastructure such as computing and storage in the pay-as-you-go model. Here, public clouds like AWS do the heavy lifting to maintain IT infrastructure and provide you access over the internet under pay as you go, model. They are revolutionizing the IT infrastructure industry, where traditionally, you have to maintain your servers all by yourself on-premise to run your business, but now you can offload that to the public cloud and focus on your core business. For example, CapitalOne’s core business is banking and does not run a large data center. Before going deeper into cloud computing, let’s analyze some of the key characteristics of the public cloud.
Cloud elasticity
One important characteristic of the public cloud providers such as AWS is the ability to quickly and frictionlessly provision resources. These resources could be a single instance of a database or a thousand copies of the same server used to handle your web traffic. These servers can be provisioned within minutes.Contrast that with how performing the same operation may play out in a traditional on-premises environment. Let’s use an example. You need to set up a cluster of computers to host your latest service. Your next actions probably look something like this:
- You visit the data center and realize that the current capacity is insufficient to host this new service.
- You map out a new infrastructure architecture.
- You size the machines based on the expected load, adding a few more terabytes and a few gigabytes to ensure that you don’t overwhelm the service.
- You submit the architecture for approval to the appropriate parties.
- You wait. Most likely for months.
It may not be uncommon once you get the approvals to realize that the market opportunity for this service is now gone or that it has grown more. The capacity you initially planned will not suffice. It isn’t easy to overemphasize how important the ability to deliver a solution quickly is when you use cloud technologies to enable these solutions.Image what will happen if, after getting everything set up in the data center and after months of approvals, you told the business sponsor that you made a mistake. You ordered a 64 GB RAM server instead of a 128 GB, so you won’t have enough capacity to handle the expected load. Getting the right server will take a few more months? Also, the market is moving fast, and your user workload increases 5x by the time you get the server. Now it’s good news for business, but as you cannot scale your server so fast, the user experience will ultimately be compromised, and they will switch to other options. It is not necessarily a problem in a cloud environment because instead of needing months to provision your servers, they can be provisioned in minutes. Correcting the size of the server may be as simple as shutting down the server for a few minutes, changing a drop-down box value, and restarting the server again. Even you can go serverless and let the cloud handle the scaling for you while you focus on your business problems.Hopefully, the above example here drives our point home about the power of the cloud. The cloud exponentially improves time to market. And being able to deliver quickly may not just mean getting there first. It may be the difference between getting there first and not getting there. Another powerful characteristic of a cloud computing environment is the ability to quickly shut down resources and, significantly, not be charged for that resource while it is down. In our continuing on-premises example, if we shut down one of our servers. Do you think we can call the company that sold us the server and politely asks them to stop charging us because we shut the server down? That would be a very quick conversation. It would probably not be a delightful user experience, depending on how persistent we were. They will probably say, “You bought the server; you can do whatever you want with it, including using it as a paperweight.” Once the server is purchased, it is a sunk cost for the duration of the server’s useful life.In contrast, whenever we shut down a server in a cloud environment. The cloud provider can quickly detect that and put that server back into the pool of available servers for other cloud customers to use that newly unused capacity.
