Traditionally, software applications used to run on servers that ran on in-house computers (servers), known as data centers. This meant that an organization would have to buy and manage physical computer and networking infrastructure, which used to be a considerable capital expenditure, plus they had to spend quite a lot on operating expenses. In addition, servers used to fail and required maintenance. This meant smaller companies who wanted to try things would generally not start because of the huge capital expenditure (CapEx) involved. This suggested that projects had to be well planned, budgeted, and architected well, and then infrastructure was ordered and provisioned accordingly. This also meant that quickly scaling infrastructure with time would not be possible. For example, suppose you started small and did not anticipate much traffic on the site you were building. Therefore, you ordered and provisioned fewer resources, and the site suddenly became popular. In that case, your servers won’t be able to handle that amount of traffic and will probably crash. Scaling that quickly would involve buying new hardware and then adding it to the data center, which would take time, and your business may lose that window of opportunity.
To solve this problem, internet giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google started building public infrastructure to run their internet systems, eventually leading them to launch it for public use. This led to a new phenomenon known as cloud computing.
Cloud computing refers to delivering on-demand computing resources, such as servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics, over the internet. Rather than hosting these resources locally on physical infrastructure, cloud computing allows organizations to access and utilize computing services provided by cloud service providers (CSPs). Some of the leading public CSPs are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
In cloud computing, the CSP owns, maintains, and manages the underlying infrastructure and resources, while the users or organizations leverage these resources for their applications and services.
Simply put, cloud computing is nothing but using someone else’s data center to run your application, which should be on demand. It should have a control panel through a web portal, APIs, and so on over the internet to allow you to do so. In exchange for these services, you need to pay rent for the resources you provision (or use) on a pay-as-you-go basis.
