Debunking the Cloud

The CS Industry has been a victim of buzzwords for the past couple of years if not decades. From AI, Crypto, Data Science, Blockchain and god knows what else, the industry has been constantly bombarding with these terms. Organizations have used these buzzwords to market themselves tremendously. We’ll take a look at one of these buzzwords to see whether they even have some value or are they just buzzwords

What is Cloud?

One of such buzzword nowadays is “The Cloud”. The Cloud or rather Cloud Computing to be precise, is not something very complicated. In layman’s terms, It can be considered as accessing a set of on-demand computing, storage and networking resources over the internet without the hassle of physically managing them. It refers to the hassle-free scalable and manageable infrastructure that enables organizations to the core business needs rather than focusing on managing these technical things. A formal definition would be:

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each location being a data center

What does the cloud look like?

The cloud is not a physical cloud (。_。). It is computer physically located somewhere in a datacenter and it is accessed over the internet through a Dashboard or UI. It is really

Types of Cloud

We have 3 major types of cloud.

• Public Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud
• Private Cloud

We’ll discuss them more briefly in another article as they are a topic of their own.

Cloud Providers

Different organizations are providing cloud services. The list is growing so fast but I’ll list down ones with the biggest market share:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

We’ll be discussing about AWS as it has the biggest market share and it was one of the first to implement the cloud.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services or AWS for short is one of the biggest cloud providers in the world. It is a subsidiary of Amazon. It was one of the first one to introduce the world to the concept of cloud computing. For years, They had no competitors.

The internet runs on AWS

Yes you heard it right. Most of the internet run off of AWS. it is said that somewhere between 3% to 50% of the internet services are hosted on AWS. That’s the reason whenever AWS goes down, it takes majority of the internet with it. However, This is just one example of the failure as AWS supports fault tolerant systems.

What can you do with AWS?

So you might be wondering, what can you do with AWS? AWS can accommodate a gigantic amount of Use-Case’s. Some of them are listed below:

• Hosting a Web Store
• Deploying your Web Applications
• Deploying your AI Applications
• Business Analytics
• Migration of your existing solutions to AWS

Conclusion

The cloud is not just a buzzword. It is a immensely useful piece of technology which is helping organizations scale vertically and horizontally via cloud platforms. Cloud is taking over the industry at a huge rate. It will bring a lot of opportunities with it.

This was a high level overview of the cloud computing world and AWS. We will look more into the technical details of each of the cloud provider in the upcoming articles.