Before I got accepted into the Cohort i am in currently to learn cloud engineering/DevOps I knew “the cloud” in terms of technology as a place where my photos and videos go to when my storage was full. I have also wondered how the Google Drive, Gmail etc get to do what they do behind the scenes.
Joining the cohort, attending the bootcamp, researching and one class in, I learned that the real Cloud is a process called Cloud computing and it is rapidly replacing something older, slower and way more expensive: the Traditional IT.
This is the story of that shift: from buying servers to renting them and why it matters.
Traditional IT: The era of physical data centers and hardware ownerships
Traditional IT was that old world. Think physical data centres: companies buying giant metal servers, renting warehouse space to keep them cold, hiring security just to guard them. Need more power? Order new hardware and wait 6 weeks for delivery. Traffic spike on launch day? Site crashes, and everyone blames everyone. It’s like buying a whole cow every time you want a glass of milk, expensive, slow, and wasteful. I learned that most of the “IT” in “Traditional IT” was just keeping the lights on. No wonder innovation was slow.
Cloud Computing: On-demand IT like Electricity
Then comes cloud computing. No more buying the cow. You just buy the milk, when you need it. Cloud is basically renting IT resources i.e servers, storage, databases over the internet from places like AWS, Azure, or GCP. Need one server to test an idea? Click, it’s live in 2 minutes. Need 1,000 servers for Black Friday traffic? Click again. Done with them at midnight? Delete them and stop paying.
The game changer for me was “pay-as-you-go.” In traditional IT, you drop $50k upfront for a server that might sit idle 70% of the time. In the cloud, you pay per second it runs, like an Uber instead of owning a car you park all day. That’s why I can run labs on my HP Folio 9470m, I don’t host anything.
The Why: Speed, Scale, and survival
So why is every modern business sprinting to the cloud? Two words: speed and scale. I learned that in traditional IT, getting a new server meant tickets, approvals, procurement and 3 months later you get to start coding. In the cloud, a startup can test an idea this afternoon. If it flops, you spent $4, not $40k. If it blows up, you scale to millions of users without buying new hardware.
Netflix at 8pm has 100x more traffic than 3am. If they owned servers for that 8pm peak, they’d waste money all night. Cloud lets them scale up for movies, scale down after. Same for Jumia on Black Friday; imagine if they crashed every sale or had to buy servers that sit empty all year. Cloud also means global in 1 hour. Want your app in Nigeria and the US? Deploy to both regions before lunch. Traditional IT means building two data centres. That’s why this shift isn’t optional. It’s how companies stay alive and innovate fast. And honestly, it’s why I had to sit up and get serious; this is where the opportunity is.
DevOps Context: Why this shift is my playground for the next 6 months
This is where cloud stops being “cool tech” and becomes the reason our DevOps cohort exists. You can’t automate a physical server you have to drive to. But cloud? Everything is an API. Need a network? Write it in Terraform. Need 10 servers? ‘Terraform apply’. Break one? Delete and rebuild in 3 minutes. That’s automation, one of the big DevOps wins.
The second win is collaboration. Traditional IT built walls: devs wrote code, tossed it to ops, ops blamed devs when it crashed. With cloud, we all work in the same AWS account. Devs can spin up infra. Ops can read app code. We deploy with the same pipeline, watch the same dashboards, get paged together.
“You build it, you run it” only works because cloud got rid of the hardware gatekeepers.
For me, this shift is personal. I spent a year unproductive because I thought tech needed expensive gear I didn’t have. Cloud means my 2012 HP Folio isn’t the limit — AWS free tier is my data centre. DevOps means I won’t spend my career racking servers; I’ll spend it writing code that manages servers. So these next 6 months, we’re learning Docker, CI/CD, Terraform, and monitoring not just because they’re trendy. We’re learning them because cloud made them possible, and DevOps makes cloud useful.
I’m still new. But the great shift is clear: we’re moving from owning machines to automating ideas.
Written by Egwu Chidiebere Agha, Cloud Computing/DevOps Student
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