What Is Cloud Computing and What Are Its Benefits?

Introduction to cloud computing

For a long time, deploying IT services and software required non-trivial infrastructure investments, such as expensive servers, large storage devices, backup power sources, and specialized real-estate areas to host these infrastructure requirements (yes, we call them data centers).

This made hosting IT services and applications impossible for small companies and start-ups with tight budgets. Only those corporates with massive IT budgets could afford such an investment, and even that investment decision was not taken easily. Aside from the budget challenges, running these complex infrastructures hosting the IT services was not easy and required people with specialized know-how.

Fortunately, since the early 2000s, the IT industry has noted how the availability of IT infrastructure could be a significant entry barrier for companies aiming to build IT services. From there, “cloud computing” emerged.

Cloud computing delivers IT computing (and storage) services over the internet (or any other network). Instead of the organizations putting massive financial investments into buying IT infrastructure to host their IT solutions, they’ll rent these services from someone else.

It becomes on-demand usage of IT services instead of owned IT services. Companies that provide these IT services on demand are called cloud vendors. This has opened the door to many opportunities we will discuss in this course.

Benefits of cloud computing

The fact that cloud computing services are delivered on-demand opens the door to so many innovative opportunities, such as:

• Reduced costs: Cloud computing helps companies reduce their infrastructure costs as they’ll no longer need to bear the cost of hosting an expensive IT infrastructure. The cloud vendors are responsible for that. As users, we only pay for the portion of the IT services we use. Whether we use it or not, we do not need to pay the full cost of the data center.

• Faster time to market: Cloud computing helps businesses quickly build and release software solutions. Accessing hosting infrastructure becomes as simple as buying the service from the cloud vendor with a few mouse clicks. Compare this to the scenario where a business wants to build its data center. Finding a proper place to host the data center, adding the required cooling/power backup, securing it, and performing other logistics needed to host traditional data centers will take significant time.

• Scalability/Flexibility: Another related benefit to cloud computing is that it helps organizations scale their IT services quickly based on demand. Adding or removing computing resources becomes as simple as clicking a few buttons. It allows businesses with seasonal demand, such as e-commerce, to easily respond to high-demand periods (e.g., summer sales) by scaling up their leased IT resources and easily scaling them down when the higher demand is gone. This is almost impossible with data centers, as IT hardware should be ordered with waiting time.

• Innovation: Cloud computing encourages innovation and experimentation by allowing companies to quickly experiment and provision/de-provision computing resources at a low cost. Unlike data centers, there is no risk of enormous cost loss due to the purchase of expensive IT infrastructure.

In the following section, you’ll learn some examples of what types of services cloud computing can offer.

Types of cloud computing services

Even though the name cloud computing may give a feeling that cloud computing is mainly concerned with computing services, this is far from the truth. Cloud computing spans a wide range of services. Here is a non-inclusive list:

• Compute services: These services provide processing capabilities to host our applications. They could be virtual machines, web servers, high compute clusters, or batch job schedulers.

• Storage services: These services enable us to store vast volumes of data, such as binary files, media, databases, and virtual machine images.

• AI and machine learning: These services allow us to perform artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks in the cloud. Examples include image recognition services, machine learning model training, and deep learning specialized virtual machines

• Networking services: These services open the doors for us to different networking scenarios, such as gateways and firewalls to secure our applications and virtual networks to isolate our critical infrastructure components.

• Integration services: These services allow you to integrate applications, data, and processes across your organization. They include API gateways, message brokers, and workflow orchestration tools.

As we’ve seen from the previous list, cloud computing is enormous. It covers almost every aspect of the IT ecosystem, so do not let the word computing give you the feeling that it is limited to computing resources.

Big cloud computing players in the market

After we’ve understood cloud computing, its benefits to businesses, and its different services, it is time to learn more about some of the most prominent cloud vendors in the market.

• Microsoft Azure: Usually referred to as Azure, it is the cloud computing platform Microsoft released in 2008. It supports many computing (such as virtual machines), storage (such as storage accounts), and identity services (such as Azure AD), among many others. We will cover many of these services during the course.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Founded in 2006 by the parent organization Amazon, AWS is the largest cloud computing platform. AWS services cover machine learning, storage, and computing technologies.

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Google founded GCP in 2008. GCP provides a wide range of cloud computing services in computing, databases, and big data areas, among many others.

In the vast majority of cases, we’ll find that almost all three major cloud vendors offer more or less the same services. However, some specifics could differentiate each vendor, such as the SLA of the particular service, the pricing, or available features.

Other smaller market players include Alibaba, Salesforce, Digital Ocean, Oracle, and IBM. Later on, we’ll learn some foundational cloud computing concepts.