Before the internet, computers were being used for limited use cases. The dawn of the internet allowed multiple computers to exchange data in a meaningful way, providing the capability to solve many more interesting problems.
Based on this premise, various distributed applications have developed ever since. These applications need to run 24/7 to provide services to their users. Data centers are facilities that provide a structure to host computer servers connected to the internet. These applications are then installed on the servers to serve user requests.
Setting up the proper environment in these data centers required lots of effort and was very time-consuming, hindering the companies from innovating quickly and efficiently. Companies had to purchase or rent racks in these data centers, then purchase computer servers, provision them, install them in the rack, and connect them to the internet.
Once they are done setting up the environment, they have to provide on-going support in patching the OS, monitoring for security threats, handling hardware failure, and replacing old servers with new ones.
That is to say, all this took specialized teams and was a waste of time and resources for most of the organizations. It took away precious time, which could instead be spent developing features that can differentiate their business from others and get them ahead of their competition.
Cloud Computing became popular very quickly to resolve these issues. It provided a way to ease the heavy lifting for these organizations. Cloud computing pretty much refers to renting someone else’s computer and pay them for the use, such as by the hour, etc.
It is analogous to how we use electricity. When we flip the switch to turn on the light, we are charged for the usage, just like that cloud computing provides an on-demand usage of compute, network, and storage services.
Cloud providers have a shared responsibility model for consumers. The cloud provider manages the infrastructure and virtualized hosts’ security, whereas the consumers are responsible for securely running their applications.
An organization willing to move to the cloud can benefit from the following characteristics of the cloud.
- Cost-Effective: Pay for what you use, instead of over-provisioning to accommodate peak loads or increased future trends.
- Operational Excellence: Monitor and audit every aspect of your infrastructure, detect and react to failures before customers do.
- Replace CAPEX with OPEX: Do not have to spend thousands of dollars to purchase equipment in advance.
- Automation: Using various tools and services, you can automate as much as your heart desires.
- Scalability: Allows you not to guess what the system load will be in the future; you can scale as the need arises.
- Elasticity: Ability to scale up to absorb more traffic/load during peak times and to scale down to save cost during quiet periods.
- Reliability: running apps in multiple data centers so that one data center going down does not affect the application uptime.
- Performance: The breadth and depth of cloud services make it easy to achieve the desired performance.
In summary, there is quite a bit of attraction in moving to the cloud. However, this task requires cloud knowledge and the ability to architect cost-effective and secure solutions. CRE8IVELOGIX Inc. is founded by a former AWS Sr. Solutions Architect, who not only have an in-depth knowledge of AWS services but also helped various startups and enterprises with their transformation strategy. We would love to partner with you.
