What is the Cloud?
In a very basic sense, the Cloud can be imagined as data centres located somewhere in the world. Hence before trying to understand what a is cloud, let us learn about data centres.
What is a data centre?
A data centre is a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure, building, running, and delivering applications and services, and storing and managing the data associated with those applications and services.
Initially, around 15 to 20 years ago, when companies had to develop applications they used to buy servers from server providers such as HP, IBM, Microsoft etc and set up data centres for these servers. The setup was complicated and very expensive as it needed many hardware and software requirements to set up these data centres.
Even with the complicated setup, there was a drawback or issue. Suppose, the server had 20 GB of memory and 20 CPUs. If the application deployed on this server required only 2GB of memory, all the remaining memory was of no use since no other application with any software differences could be deployed on it
This was when the concept of virtualisation came into existence wherein we create many virtual servers on top of actual servers according to the application requirement. With this method, we could deploy as many applications as needed on a single server.
As time went on, it was difficult for small companies or startups to set up a data centre and dedicated team to maintain it. This was when the Cloud services came into existence. Amazon, which is the pioneer in cloud services saw this opportunity and started Amazon Web Services(AWS)
Cloud
AWS started creating the data centres and providing these for rent. They took up the whole responsibility of setting up a data centre, maintaining it and securing it. The companies had to just pay a fixed amount and use these servers.
These servers can be situated anywhere in the world and used worldwide. AWS does not disclose the exact location of these data centres for privacy and security. Since these servers could be anywhere in the world, we started calling them CLOUD.
There are 2 types of cloud services :
Public and Private Cloud
Private Cloud: In this case, the data centres are completely managed by providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP and we can use their resources by request. All you need to do is create an account with them, use the services and pay as you go.
Public Cloud: In this case, the cloud platform is created, managed and secured by the organizations themselves.
Why Public Cloud?
Maintenance: Maintaining a private cloud involves a lot of steps such as purchasing servers, setting up data centres, maintaining them, working on the security and updates time to time. All these are overboard for mid-scale organizations or startups who can easily rent a Private Cloud
Cost: Private clouds are available at a much lower cost since the private cloud providers are doing it on a larger scale.
Why is AWS so popular?
AWS has a first-mover advantage as they are the pioneer in cloud platforms. So many companies who started cloud started with AWS itself because of which they have the largest market share in the cloud platform. This largest market share further draws customers to choose AWS as their cloud providers.