The "Swapped" animated movie was such an interesting watch on Netflix. Lovely graphics, great humor, with a reminder of the powerful bonds of friendship and family. It had it all! All this was thanks to a series of powerful computers housed in data centers delivering computing services over thousands of miles. The power of the cloud moved Netflix from a DVD rental service by mail to a leading global platform offering a vast selection of movies, TV shows, documentaries, and even games through its streaming service.
As far back as 2005, a Nigerian company trying to launch a website would spend millions buying expensive servers, renting server rooms, providing constant power, installing cooling systems, hiring a full IT team to babysit processes 24/7, and paying for security — all before writing a single line of code. Now, the same company can rent all these resources over the internet through a subscription, without the burden of infrastructure, space, or personnel, and have full freedom to specify computing needs (service models) and who has access to these platforms (deployment models)!
Imagine the same Nigerian company — say Richard Inc. (lol) — against all odds, gets running and does very well in the market, providing, say, food delivery services online. A good business day also brings with it huge strains on limited internal servers and suddenly, crash! The server goes dark. For a new business, this could be catastrophic, and new customers, after just a few minutes of service timeout, may swivel into the waiting arms of the competition. With cloud computing, a good business day can stay a blessing, with servers scaled up to match rising demand and customers none the wiser.
What if something happens to these computers? We know systems fail and natural disasters happen. Is Richard Inc. or Netflix just one catastrophe (flood, fire outbreak, etc.) away from going dark? While for traditional data centers this might be the end of operations, cloud services transcend these hurdles with the principle of redundancy. Data redundancy means copies of essential company data can be stored in multiple places locally within a data center, in multiple sites in a region called availability zones, and even across regions in different geographical locations! This redundancy also cuts across power supply grids, with primary grid power giving way to instant battery backup, generator power, multiple grid connections, and even renewable energy backups in sequence to ensure no power outage — not even for a millisecond.
The powerful system of the cloud suddenly opens up doors for small businesses to competitively thrive globally where this would otherwise not be possible. To soar in the global space, one must reach for the cloud! (Haha, see what I did there?)
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