As part of my CS3216 Class Seminar, I got to learn the overview of cloud computing. Here is my ELI5 summary of the seminar:
In ancient times (aka 10 years ago), there existed a job we call Sys-admin. Their main habitats are called data centres, and they work tirelessly to make sure that none of the servers catch fire. Nowadays, sys-admins are almost non-existent, and this is because of the cloud. So what edges do the cloud have over self-hosting data centres?
Old data centres back in the day have a lot of problem with reliability:
- Flooding → Server break
- Lose power → Server break
- New sysadmin messed sth up → Server break
You get the idea. Compare that with today, where you just have to pay a small sum (sometimes even free), and let AWS or Google deal with those problems, your enterprise just needs to focus on the application itself.
Secondly, scalability. Imagine your brand new startup working on cat image API. You expect an average of about 3000 cute cat pictures on the database only, so you just purchase enough storage for that. Then one day Elon Musk tweets about how cool your API is, and suddenly you are flooded with traffic. You rush to Sim Lim Square to buy more storage, but by the time you get back your server is already down to normal because Elon found a better cat image API, and you are left with useless storage laying around. What is better about it? Well they use AWS, so if the traffic increases they can just add more storage (for a price of course).
Essentially, the cloud is a simple lesson on the economics of scale, as the cost for maintenance, for scaling, for security,etc will diminish the more people use it. This is why Google Cloud and AWS functions as a whole. With the current cloud solution, your solution can be as complicated as you need to customize (build the whole infrastructure as code), or can be as simple as you want (build a free, easy to setup backend in less than 1 day).
Yet, the cloud is not without its problems. Wrong setup of cloud services can incur substantial costs, and it’s quite easy for you to be locked into a cloud ecosystem (they can even make this easier by writing bad integration documents). Hence, why the cloud is powerful, be careful about the potential downfall you can have with setting it up.