Understand Cloud Computing in 3 Minutes
A Quick Starter Guider to kick start your cloud journey
In the old days, you need to buy a hard-disk or USB to store the files / images / documents. With cloud storage like Dropbox / Google Drive, you could upload and download your images with free quotas. This is one of the most common usage of cloud in our daily life.
Why would these storage provider provide free storage? What are the secrets behind the cloud computing? What are other usages of cloud computing? You will find the answer on this story.
Is Cloud Computing really on Cloud?
Although it calls Cloud, all cloud data centres are still built on the ground. It’s the on-demand availability of computer system resources. The cloud providers simply build many massive data centres and customers could easily select and ‘lend’ the computer system resources (e.g. storage, computing power) for their usages.
With this service, people could provision a web server in less than 1 minute . Comparing with the traditional data centre, it may take several weeks.
What are the key benefits of using Cloud?
The answer is very straightforward— Economy of Scale. The cloud providers build and operate these cloud data centres to serve over 1 million active customers. Everyone could benefit from the costs gained driven by this huge consumption.
With the Power of Cloud, it enables following key benefits which are driving the future technologies ,
- Scalability
- Reliability
- Elasticity
- Redundancy
Netflix is the software technology pioneer for cloud computing starting at 2006 and still leveraging the power of cloud for video streaming till now. It provided billions hours of service to customers around the globe which is a good example of scalability and elasticity.
With a key pricing concept — Pay as You Go instead of charging a fixed monthly rent, it’s formula-based charge based on your cloud resource usage. It enables the pricing elasticity to reduce the upfront infrastructure setup cost.
Can I learn cloud computing without technical background?
I started my journey four years ago with very limited technical knowledge. With the user-friendly UI, comprehensive tutorials and videos, most public cloud platform are designed for non-technical people to easily pick up and taste the power of cloud.
However, it does not mean you don’t need those technical foundation. (e.g. networking design, system integration). Public cloud platforms are just providing structured ways to let you learn and pick up technical concepts without long and complex infrastructure setup.
OK! I’m ready! How can I start my journey?
Most of the public cloud providers provide 1-year free trial that you could try most of the cloud services apart from some expensive services (e.g. Azure Express-route).
Based on 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, top three public cloud providers are below:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
You could simply choose one provider and start your journey!
