What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing services(aka. Cloud services) are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third party providers and made available to users through the internet.
Advantages of Cloud Computing
Currently more and more companies and people use Cloud services to develop their applications. I still remember when I was in my intern for a startup during master, our company built compute resources and hardware, like GPU, memory, all by ourselves. It requires us to buy physical resources, set them up, and invest efforts in maintaining the operation everyday. As cloud computing becomes mature and trending, using Cloud services is our first choice.
There are at least 5 advantages of leveraging Cloud:
Fast software development cycle: Compared with physical resources, it is convenient to set up infrastructure. Most cloud services provide powerful features and easy-to-use interface for customers to quickly lay the groundwork and make fast deployment. Developers do not need to invest effort in hardware level and focus on application core logic. Also, Cloud services provide pipeline to faciliate CI(continuous integration)/CD(continuous deployment), which helps developers test their code with less effort and time.
Scalability: Usually trending Cloud services like AWS have multiple data centers across the world. Taking privilege of massive resources built by Cloud service company, you can easily scale up/scale down your application. You can even set up autoscaling policy which scales your application automatically. This feature is extremely important for distributed system when high traffic are expected. For example, if traffic varies and sometimes high peak traffic comes in, your application won’t suffer outage, because Cloud service can distribute more resources as needed to handle extra traffic.
Tolerate failure and easy to restore: Since Cloud services have data centers across the world, it makes possible to have your application deployed to multiple devices. If one hardware goes wrong, it won’t cause your whole application completely down, becasue you can still access data from else where application is deployed. Also, the broken hardware can be restored or replaced by backup stored in other places.
Security: Cloud service is in network but it does not mean it is insecure. Cloud services provide multiple levels of permission for your application. For example, it provides access rules in network, permission policies and encryption in each storage service, permission services on application level and etc. All those protects your application data level by level. It is difficult for someone else who is not granted permission to access your application and data.
Save money: Last but not least, you save huge amount of money in buying physical resources and maintaining operation. By using Cloud service, you pay what you exactly need by releasing idle resources in one click.
Hopefully, I have convinced you that Cloud Computing is promising when people build enterprise-level application or individual incubation project. If you have not considered Cloud Computing as an option, it is worth trying out and exploring benefits provided by Cloud services from today.
Popular Cloud Providers
Many large tech companies already started business in Cloud computing. I recommend top 3 of current trending Cloud providers and their companies.
Amazon Web Services(AWS): Amazon Web Services(AWS) is provided by Amazon and is generally viewed as the number one global vendor for cloud services. It offers more than 200 IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services and its data center are spread and available across the world
Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Azure cloud platform is provided by Microsoft and are the choice of cloud platform for many big companies
Google Cloud: Google Cloud is provided by Google and is considered the third vendor in the top 3, along with AWS and Azure
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