Cloud Computing 101: Taking Businesses to Cloud Nine — Part 1

8 min readMay 31, 2019

In this article, you will learn:

What is cloud computing
About the Benefits of cloud computing and why are companies migrating to it
Who are the cloud providers and how do they compare

This is a 4 part series where we start from an introduction to cloud computing followed by a deep dive into cloud computing then moving to Microsoft Azure Deep dive with some hands-on exercises.

So you heard that cloud computing is the thing and all the companies are moving to cloud. The following statistics gives it away:

Cloud adoption statistics reveal that by 2020 a staggering 83% of the company workload will be stored on the cloud. (Source: LogicMonitor/Forbes) [1]
According to IDC, the three sectors that plan to spend most on cloud computing services are manufacturing ($19.7 billion), professional services ($18.1 billion), and banking ($16.7 billion). (Source: IDC) [1]
Cloud apps can aid companies’ collaborative tasks, file sharing, content sharing, and data security. The average employee uses 36 cloud-based services in their daily routine. (Source: SkyHigh) [1]

Not only for businesses, but it’s a great career choice as well as per the below facts:

Cloud computing is the #1 most in-demand hard skill, according to LinkedIn. Half of the most promising jobs of 2019 will require a good knowledge of this emerging technology. (Source: LinkedIn) [1]
The median salary for professionals in the field now stands at $146.350. (Source: Forbes) [1]

But what the heck is cloud computing after all?

According to Oxford Dictionary-

“The practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.”

And according to Webster Dictionary-

“The practice of storing regularly used computer data on multiple servers that can be accessed through the Internet.”

But the most simplest of way of seeing it is-

“There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer.”

Technically, this statement is right, but there’s a lot more to it. Firstly, that “someone else’s computer” are actually huge data centers spread across acres of lands with thousands of servers in an isolated environment with high security. Secondly, it’s more of using computing resources over the internet which range from just a VPN to a full fledged GPU-Powered Virtual Machine.

Let’s look at the Berkeley’s view of Cloud Computing:

The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, thereby eliminating the need for cloud computing users to plan far ahead for provisioning
The elimination of an up-front commitment by cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs
The ability to pay for the use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (e.g., processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them as needed, thereby rewarding conservation by letting machines and storage go when they are no longer useful

This is the crux of cloud computing, thank you Berkeley. They tell us the basic definition of Cloud Computing and its benefits. With this, let’s try to answer another question.

Why cloud computing?

As we saw in the beginning that many companies are moving to cloud computing but why are they doing so? According to Bitkom, Cloud Computing…

Helps them focus on core business instead of IT Operations
Provides them with Standardized, up-to-date and consolidated IT
Moves CAPEX(CAPital EXpenditure) to OPEX(OPerations EXpenditure)
Helps in becoming more flexible in meeting demands
Transfers investments, risk, and human resources to a vendor
Provides reliable availability and high level of security

This helps businesses cope up with high peak demands smoothly and almost instantaneously with zero or a few clicks. Also, Reduction of capacity during low loads = High Reduction in Costs. Cloud computing can in fact reduce the costs by 60–70%!

The following statistics will also help us understand the reason for cloud adoption better:

The positive impact of cloud technology is almost instantaneous. 80% of companies report operation improvements within the first few months of adopting the tech. (Source: Multisoft)
A major reason for the hypergrowth of the public cloud is its affordability. Small and medium businesses find it 40% more cost-effective to employ third-party cloud platforms than maintaining an in-house system. (Source: Multisoft)
Cloud technology is so reliable when it comes to safety that 94% of businesses report significant improvements in online security after moving their data to the cloud. (Source: Salesforce)

We can see that clearly Cloud Computing has a lot of potential and benefits for the businesses.

But Who does Cloud Computing?

It’s the vendors who we talked about earlier. These vendors are mostly the tech giants namely

Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Alibaba Cloud

But how do they compare to each other?

Let’s talk about them one by one.

Amazon Web Services

What is it?

Amazon Web Services or AWS is the cloud platform provided by Amazon. AWS launched in 2006 from the internal infrastructure that Amazon.com built to handle its online retail operations. AWS was one of the first companies to introduce a pay-as-you-go cloud computing model that scales to provide users with compute, storage or throughput as needed. [2]

What does it provide?

More than 100 services comprise the Amazon Web Services portfolio, including those for compute, databases, infrastructure management, application development and security which covers almost everything that a business will ever need.

Why should you choose AWS over others?

AWS is the oldest and most mature cloud provider in the market with the widest array of products and services. It also has more third party and open source services than other providers.

Useful Links

Microsoft Azure

What is it?

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure was announced in October 2008, started with codename “Project Red Dog”, and released on February 1, 2010, as “Windows Azure” before being renamed “Microsoft Azure” on March 25, 2014. [3]

What does it provide?

Similar to AWS, Azure provides myriad of services for every business need. It gives you the ability to deploy and manage virtual machine scale sets which provide autoscaling as well. You can apply the computing power as per your need within minutes. Moreover, you can run your custom software in large-scale parallel batch computing which is not available in Google Cloud Platform. It also provides features like Azure Visual Studio Online, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Scheduler which are not available in AWS.

Why should you choose Azure over others?

The biggest advantage of Azure over others is the seamless integration with your On-Premises Microsoft Technologies. Azure makes it super easy to work with your windows server instances. For developers, it provides all the tools in Visual Studio itself so that they don’t have to move back and forth from the portal to IDE.

Useful Links

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

What is it?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube. In April 2008, Google announced a preview release of App Engine, a developer tool that allowed users to run their web applications on Google infrastructure, which was the first cloud computing service from the company. [4]

What does it provide?

Google Cloud Platform offers services for compute, storage, networking, big data, machine learning and the internet of things (IoT), as well as cloud management, security and developer tools. Google continues to add higher-level services, such as those related to big data and machine learning, to its cloud platform.

Why should you choose GCP over others?

GCP has pricing advantage with their Pay-per-second and Committed Use Discounts which makes it much cheaper than the competitors. Google also boasts about speeds up to 10 Tbps with their Faster Cable System. As per TechCrunch, even though computing and storage are separate in Google Compute Engine, due to super-fast speeds, to the user it seems as if it is one.

Useful Links

Let’s look at the market share for some popular cloud providers

Amazon Web Services leads the race followed by Microsoft Azure with Google Cloud Platform on the third place.

As you can see above, emerging start-ups adopt Azure while Growth in adoption and Growth in footprint of Azure is higher than AWS.

Summary

To summarize this article, Cloud Computing is using computing resources over the internet. These resources are provided by cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. Cloud computing provides benefits like Reduced costs, High Scalability and Rapid setup and deployment which businesses desire.

With this article, we have answered the What, Why and Who of the cloud computing. In the next article, we shall take a deep dive into cloud computing concepts and answer more of What part of it followed by “How” of cloud computing where we will do a hands-on exercise to concrete the concepts.

As for When and Where, the answer to “Where” is on the Internet in front of your monitor screen and “When” is NOW!

Thanks for reading this article and hope you have a wonderful day ahead! :D

Keep Learning and Keep Growing!

References:

Cloud Computing 101: Taking Businesses to Cloud Nine — Part 1

But what the heck is cloud computing after all?

Why cloud computing?

But Who does Cloud Computing?

Amazon Web Services

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Written by Ahmad Uzair