In 2020, Cloud computing has become an integral part of IT culture and its growth rate increased to $30bn in 2020. It is everywhere and to better understand its existence we have to know how the industry used to develop, manage & operate its resources before the cloud came into the picture.
Roughly around a decade ago, all the software companies used to have their compute such as servers, databases, storage, networking, and analytics hosted on-premise and self-managed. Seems casual and fine right? Let’s dig deeper.
Now, imagine a scenario where an e-commerce company is hosting a Christmas sale. This sale could attract potential customers to buy the products of their interest. You assume a possible load and procure all the necessary infrastructure to handle this sale. Your sale is live now and everything is going well.
This sale has attracted many customers which led to huge traffic which was way beyond the expectation. Due to this unexpected traffic, a procured resource outage happened, and the website crashed. This could hugely impact your business and customer satisfaction. That disappoints, isn’t it? what measures could you have possibly taken?
- Buying more servers? – Well, they are not cheap and imagine what would be scenario after the sale. All your servers would be idle due to a drop in the traffic
- Estimating your traffic better? – This would be a hypothesis
Summarising, this kind of infrastructure operations used to be really expensive and managing these resources used to be a tedious task. To resolve all these issues cloud computing came into picture.
Cloud computing is a paradigm of distributed computing to provide the customers on-demand services in a pay-as-you-go model. In general, Cloud is a network of computers residing in same or different geographical locations, operating together under one roof to serve customers using virtualization. A visionary quote about cloud in 1969
“Computer networks are still in their infancy. But as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of ’computer utilities’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country.”
L. Kleinrock 1969
Benefits of Cloud Computing
- No upfront investments
- No maintenance issues
- On-demand resource allocation
- Scalability
- Security
- Application life cycle management
To know more, Please read the following books
Cloud Computing for dummies: http://amzn.to/3ageh7x
Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture : https://amzn.to/3gOFCiu
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