The Cloud on Example Academy

What Is the Cloud?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Overview 🔗

Picture the sky as a boundless expanse where you can store your digital dreams, access them from anywhere, and scale your ambitions limitlessly. That, in essence, is the magic of the cloud.

The cloud is not an elusive fortress in the sky; it’s a virtual space, a digital playground where data finds its home. Instead of hoarding information on your personal devices, the cloud allows you to offload it to powerful servers that float, metaphorically, in this digital sky. These servers are not tied to a physical location; they are dispersed worldwide, forming a network that operates seamlessly.

Why Should You Bother?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why Should You Bother? 🔗

Scaling Success with Flexibility Imagine you’re a software developer working on an e-commerce platform. During a major sale event, your application experiences a surge in traffic as customers rush to make purchases. Without cloud infrastructure, you would be limited by the server capacity you initially set up. If the traffic exceeds expectations, the website could crash, leading to lost sales and frustrated customers.

A Brief History of the Cloud

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

1. Precursors and Pioneers (1950s-1990s) 🔗

The roots of the cloud can be traced back to the 1950s, when mainframe computers laid the groundwork for centralized computing. However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the term “cloud computing” began to take shape (To learn more, check out TechTarget’s “The history of Cloud Computing Explained”). Early pioneers like Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) began experimenting with the concept of delivering computing power and storage as a service.

Types of Clouds

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 🔗

What it is: Imagine you’re building a house. IaaS is like renting the land and the basic utilities (electricity, water, etc.). You have the freedom to design and build your house the way you want.

For developers: With IaaS in the cloud, developers get the basic tools (servers, storage, and networking) to create and manage their own digital ‘houses’ (applications). It’s like having your own digital construction site.

Cloud Deployment Models

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Next, let’s delve into the different cloud deployment models:

Public Cloud

In the realm of public cloud, computing resources are provided by a third-party cloud service provider and are made accessible to the general public over the internet. Most prominent examples are the top three providers - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, who offer a comprehensive public cloud platform offering a myriad of services such as virtual machines, databases, and AI capabilities. Other notable players are Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and DigitalOcean who offer similar features.

Major Cloud Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud Services 🔗

Compute Services

Compute services are like the engine of the cloud, providing the power to run applications and process data. Imagine them as the virtual brains behind your software. Virtual Machines (VMs) act as versatile computing environments, while containers, like those managed by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Rancher, offer a lightweight and scalable way to package and deploy applications.