Basics of Cloud Computing, have you ever rented your house or taken a house on rent? If you have done either of these then you have lived cloud computing.
What is cloud computing? I am sure many of you might already know about cloud computing or might be working on it. Its boom can be seen in the IT industry. Today every big company or business wants to explore cloud computing and find new paradigms.
What are the basics of cloud computing for a common man?
Cloud computing is nothing but a house on rent. For instance, when you move to a new city to search for a new job, you first look for an accommodation So that you can stay in your rented house peacefully and search for a job which is why you are here Your main business is JOB SEARCH.
In this case, you will not have enough money to afford your own house hence you will go for a rented one. The very 1st advantage of renting a house is “FLEXIBILITY” You go in a flexible contract with your landlord. Under this rental agreement, you stay in his house and pay monthly rent.
Similarly, any business goes to a cloud vendor and rents its cloud services or infrastructure. The advantage of renting a house is you do not need to worry about maintenance or security. Everything is taken care of by your landlord so that you can live in his house comfortably and focus on your main business which is JOB SEARCH.
Similarly, every company wants to focus on its main business and wants its CAPEX to be spent on growing business. But every company will need to spend on IT to support its business. Small companies do not have so much money to spend on IT. Companies go to a cloud vendor and take their services on rent.
Hence they use flexible cloud services and infrastructure Which help them grow their business. Also if tomorrow your needs or salary change you can move from 1 BHK to 3 BHK You can change your house, you can change your cloud vendor. This is the beauty of cloud computing.
Cost and maintenance
Cost is one of the major factors in understanding the basics of cloud computing. Managing in-house IT incurs a lot of cost and maintenance. This cost keeps increasing year on year considering all these benefits, cloud computing has become a very lucrative area for business to explore
Understanding the basics of cloud computing with a real-life example
Now let’s understand cloud computing from a story In a village, there was a candy maker called Robert.
His candies were very famous in his village. One day a person from his village takes his candies to an outside city for his friends. People love Robert’s candies and ask his friend to bring more next time.
Robert feels really happy with this feedback and asks his friends to take more candies with him. Suddenly he started getting a lot of demand from nearby towns and cities But Robert didn’t have any mechanism to handle such huge demand.
He was struggling to bring all his customers to a common platform for order management as a result Robert asked his son who was in IT to make a small website for him called CandyShop.com. He plans to manage sweets order and delivery from this website. But this website only worked for a short duration.
The load on the website kept increasing as his products became more and more popular. Demand started coming from across the state and from outside the country. And one day his website CRASHED! CandyShop.com crashed as it did not have the capacity to handle such a huge load.
Now, in this case, Robert will ask a cloud vendor to host his website on its cloud. Cloud vendors will go into a contract with Robert to offer cloud services on rent as per contract (monthly/quarterly/yearly). Now CandyShop.com has got the power of cloud infrastructure thus can grow on a massive scale, It no longer has in-house IT bottlenecks.
This brings us to another key advantage of cloud“LEVEL PLAYING FIELD” It means Robert can now compete with a bigger player in market competitor in his area as they both can leverage the same cloud IT services Level playing field is a key benefit of cloud computing.
The basics of cloud computing: Flexibility
As this brings a small and big player at the same level to compete equally I would now share another advantage related to flexibility. Which we talked about in our previous example.
Suppose Robert could foresee huge demand and profit making during the festive season. So he will ask his cloud vendor to increase the overall resources of his website to double If his website caters to 10,000 customers today. Then it should cater to 50,000 customers during the festival. Suppose this is required for 20 days.
Cloud enables him to get good resources for those 20 days and he has to pay the additional cost for 20 days only. On the 20th day, he would automatically come back to his original contract and would pay as per his yearly contract.
However, under in-house IT, you would have managed such capacity forever only to serve you for those 20 days during the festival which is a loss Hence you get a lot of such flexibilities given by various cloud providers.
A very basic question that might be coming in your mind is HOW THESE CLOUD VENDORS CAN GIVE CLOUD SERVICES SO CHEAPLY? Well, all these cloud vendors are big IT Giants, they have worked on their infrastructure and technology for years and hence can offer services so cheaply.
If you take the example of Google, Google is sitting on this huge infrastructure whatever you search you get it in seconds. You use Amazon for shopping, all this powered by its huge infrastructure so now they offer this power to others on rent.
These IT giants have their data centers across the globe and now they started submerging data centers under the sea! So now if a businessman based in Mumbai wants a cloud services cloud vendor will provide this from ASIA PACIFIC data center which is closest to him This helps in improved network bandwidth, performance along with lower cost as services are offered from a nearby location.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is clearly a leader at this time because they started ahead but Google and Microsoft are picking up fast. This competition is good for the market as everyone in the market gets competitive prices for cloud services.
Regardless of whether they are a big company or a startup you are offered ON-DEMAND services which means you can demand IT services based on your needs so you get all these benefits being on a cloud platform.
Cloud computing is the FUTURE although. There are big companies that still have huge in-house IT and have not fully moved to the cloud yet There are few challenges like data security especially in sectors like banking.
But with the latest security mechanisms and other advancements. It’s just a matter of time when every company will have zero IT footprint So Friends as I said, cloud computing is very easy to understand I know many of you already know.
Study or use these concepts But my aim was to present it in such a way that a person with NO IT background can also understand cloud computing It might be possible that some Robert from a small village could sell his sweets in New York and has sufficient money to use the cloud.
So we should spread IT knowledge to everyone and this might help them grow their businesses So friends either through me or via you I hope this knowledge reaches everyone.
Lastly, I would like to add one more point for young students: please add cloud computing to your CV. Your profile will become very strong and you will be recognized by good companies.
Everyone has a place in the cloud be it from any IT background I feel you should build your career as a cloud developer, cloud architect, etc.
There are a lot of certifications in the market to enhance your skills you should do hand-on training to understand these concepts avoid mugging up these concepts and invest time practicing these skills.
Every other cloud vendor provides free accounts. This helps them market their product and we get an equal chance to learn. So friends please add cloud in your career profile. You can be a future cloud architect, developer, cybersecurity expert, and much more.
