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What is cloud computing anyways?

And why does it matter?

If you have never heard about something like AWS or Azure before, then it must feel like some alien technology with cool names where nerds throw difficult words here and there. And nothing pretty much makes any sense.

Infrastructure, cloud, serverless- What does this all really mean?

But just like everything, its not complicated, and maybe the first step towards becoming a good cloud engineer is to understand its raison dtre; its reason for existence.

Why do Companies use Cloud?

You might think, in a world which keeps getting expensive, why would someone in their right minds decide to buy expensive cloud services? I havent even bought a spotify premium yet, and piratesbay is my netflix, so it really didnt make any sense to a peasant like me at all.

Not only these giant corporations lock you in their ecosystems, but you have to keep sending them hard-earned cash annually.

But the thing is, cloud services save you moneys. Loads of money. If you hire a good cloud engineer that is (Thats why you should hire me in future)

Anyways, the thing is, every big company worth its salt have a need of huge amounts of expensive hardware. The servers, data centers and all.

Lets take an example. Imagine you are a CTO or whatever of some big company, and you guys come with an idea of a new product that can take the world by storm.

After a long stupid meeting, you guys come to a conclusion that for this new product, your company will have to buy loads of hardware. It will take atleast 2 weeks to get delivered, a week to get configured, and a huge amount of upfront installation fees.

Worse than this is, what if that new brilliant app doesnt get any new customers. All of this will go to waste.

Even after all this, you might worry about how one earthquake or tsunami near your hardware resources can wipe away all the data of your precious little company. Its too much worry, and rich people dont like to worry at all. So, thats why smart people at amazon invented AWS.

AWS gives you access to all these hardware services online. So instead of going through all the worry, you can just rent some amazon hardware at a fractional cost and you are ready for development in a matter of minutes.

No installation cost, No salary to IT guys, and no worry about natural disasters or some technical issue wiping away your entire company.

Its just like putting your images on google drive. You dont have to worry about buying new memory cards everytime your storage gets full. You can just pay very minimal money and buy a good amount of storage.

Even if your mobile god-forbids gets damaged (or snatched if you live where I live: Karachi) you know that you still have access to your pictures.

Another great point is that you have to pay much less to AWS. They have what they call pay-as-you-go service. Something like google drive.

What this means is, you have to pay only for the resources you use, and as your customers grow, you can buy additional resources according to your needs. This is an important advantage.

If you had to buy your own hardware before the product launches, you would either fall in a condition where you bought less resources and now your product is crashing, or you bought more than needed resources and now they are sitting idle.

Both of them put you at a disadvantage, and in this cut-throat corporate competition, disadvantages like these can amount up to a failed business.

Anyways, so thats what the point of cloud computing is. Its a better way to use hardware resources for big companies who can not afford the hassle of having their own hardware setup.

So keeping this all in mind, big corporations prefer using a cloud computing platform like AWS or Azure. And thats where good cloud engineers come in.

They understand all the services in and out, and can make decisions as to which cloud services would save the most amount of companys cash.

But you might be thinking: What if there is a natural disaster at an amazon data center where my data is kept?

Smart people at amazon have thought about this too. Ill talk about this in the next article. Thanks for reading!

Read the original post:
What is cloud computing anyways?. And why does it matter? | by Hamza Iqbal | Feb, 2024 - Medium