What’s all the fuss about cloud technology? An introduction to the cloud and its use cases.
Terrified of losing a cherished family photo? In the past you may have uploaded it to a hard drive and stored a printed copy. Now you can back it up to the cloud without worrying about losing the hard drive or your printed photo fading.
But what is the cloud? Where is your photo going? And are there uses for the cloud outside of enshrining your photos forever?
The “cloud” has become a buzzword, thrown around with many of us unsure as to what it is. Although this cloud is different than the condensed collections of water in the sky that we learn about as kids, it is nearly as expansive and just as physical. We will discuss what the cloud is and take a look at some of its common use cases below.
What is the cloud?
The cloud is a network of technology resources spanning the globe. In the past companies might have used on-premise machines to support their business. The cloud allows you to use a cloud provider’s machines to run your services, store your data, or perform a plethora of other technical resource intensive activities.
No longer do you need to store your photos on a treasured hard drive. And no longer do startup founders need to worry about maintaining their own on-premise machines. The cloud provides services that make the lives of technologists and the broader world easier. Rather than maintaining your own machines or data centers, you can easily provision and interact with technical services through a cloud provider.
Who runs the cloud?
Cloud providers are companies that offer cloud services, ultimately powering the cloud. There are three main cloud providers: Amazon offers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google has Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft powers Microsoft Azure. These three providers made up 65.6% of the market share as of June 2022, with AWS leading with over a third of the market. Yes, this is where Bezos has made much of his money.
In order to offer cloud services, these companies have data centers around the world. Customers can use a cloud provider’s vast networks to reduce or even eliminate their on-premise machines. Ultimately, this technical approach encourages specialization: cloud providers focus on providing robust cloud services, enabling users to focus on other aspects of their business.
When might you use the cloud?
Specialization is great, but the cloud might not seem immediately valuable to you. After taking a closer look, we see a lot of our technical pain points can be alleviated by the cloud.
Above we discussed how the cloud can reduce the need for on-premise machines. You might be thinking: I don’t have my own data center, so why would this be relevant? But the cloud can be used at a much smaller scale.
You might have photos or documents stored on your laptop, but you are running out of space. To free up resources, you can upload these images and documents to the cloud. This idea of storing data on the cloud is just the tip of the iceberg for what the cloud can be used for.
Say you are a photographer launching a website to display and sell your photos to the world. You might have hundreds of pictures you want displayed on the site. But where do these pictures come from? You can upload all of them to a cloud storage solution, such as AWS’s S3, and use an API gateway or even hit the storage endpoints directly to support the rendering of these photos on your website.
What if you are a large retailer like Target? From Black Friday to Cyber Monday you experience way more web traffic, sales, and profits than a typical weekend. To support this increased traffic, you need more machines than usual to ensure customers don’t experience lag time or issues purchasing your products online. To support this increased technical demand, you might choose to build your purchasing platform and website with a cloud provider. In doing so, you can scale up and down your technical resources to more seamlessly and efficiently handle ebbs and flows in web traffic.
And what about more technical roles like machine learning engineers? You need to run rigorous models, which requires large compute power. To do so you might consider using GCP’s services so you can use machines with significant compute power, and quickly scale them down following running your models. Rather than paying for these machines, you only pay for your use of them.
There are countless other use cases for the cloud, ranging from supporting every day activities to building complicated technology. The cloud does not make sense to use in all cases, but it is a powerful tool to consider.
Conclusion
The cloud is a collection of remote machines, maintained by cloud providers to support various technology services. With the hundreds of services cloud providers offer, countless use cases can leverage the cloud.
Using the cloud allows customers to step away from machine management, freeing them to focus on what they do best. With society’s increased push towards innovation and no-code solutions, the cloud has become increasingly popular. Although it is not a fit for all use cases, the cloud can drastically reduce the go to market time for a startup, enable robust and scalable systems, and even help free up space on your smart phone.
For more readings, check out the additional resources below and stay tuned for more articles on cloud technology.