Introduction to Cloud Computing
Before learning about cloud and cloud computing, let’s understand the traditional IT solution. After that, you will learn what cloud computing is and understand the importance of cloud computing with the help of an example. First, let’s take a look at this video.
In the video, you learnt how traditionally an organisation sets up its IT resources. Traditionally, organisations installed physical servers and data centres on their premises. Organisations would need to buy and manage all the servers and data centres on their own. In case of any outages, it is that company’s responsibility to fix them. The organisation would also need to employ a lot of people to take care of these resources, which would result in increased expenditure. Scaling up is another major issue faced by organisations. These were some of the challenges associated with the traditional approach.
Using cloud computing, organisations would be able to tackle these challenges.
Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery of IT resources, and these resources could be accessed using the internet. There are servers that provide you with computation and storage capabilities. You no longer need to buy and maintain any infrastructure; you can just rent them whenever there is a requirement, thus removing the upfront cost involved in buying resources. Furthermore, you only need to pay the cost for the time and amount of resources that you have rented. This makes scaling up also very easy. It further leads to a significant reduction in costs and the organisations can function more efficiently as they no longer have to manage the IT resources on their own.
In the video, you looked at an example of Netflix. Earlier, the company used to have servers and data centres on their premises. In 2008, Netflix suffered a major outage at one of its data centres, which lasted three days, resulting in poor customer experience. So, they decided to rent all the infrastructure required and direct their focus on business development. Once this was done, they decided to move to the cloud, after which their business expanded, and they were able to serve a lot of content to their customers.
By now, you should have a fair understanding of the traditional approach for managing IT resources and the related challenges and how cloud computing can help tackle these challenges. So, let’s move on to the next video, wherein you will look at some of the advantages of cloud computing.
The video explained some of the advantages of cloud computing. These are as follows:
Cost: With cloud computing, you no longer have to buy all the infrastructure. You can just rent these resources, which leads to significant savings.
Performance: Cloud providers are responsible for updating the hardware and software resources, thus helping you achieve greater efficiency.
Security: Cloud providers ensure that policies are in place to make the infrastructure, application and data more secure.
Scale: Using cloud computing, you can easily scale up when needed. During peak times, more resources can be provisioned and in case of less traffic or less demand for the resources, it can be automatically scaled down.
Speed: Using the dashboard or management console of the cloud providers, you can quickly spin up new resources.
Productivity: This enables organisations to be more productive as they can focus more on their business and do not need to worry about managing the IT resources.
Additional Reading
Traditional IT setup vs Cloud Computing: You can read more about how cloud computing is different from traditional IT infrastructure.
In the next segment, you will learn about different ways in which an application can be modelled.