Why I think cloud computing is the future!

What is cloud computing?

We’ve all heard of the term cloud. “I uploaded it to the cloud”, “I host my website on the cloud”.

A few years ago, if a business wanted to have a website so its customers could engage with the company online or wanted to store important documents, so all the employees had access to them, business owners purchased servers, hard drivers and hired IT professionals to come and set it all up. We call these servers infrastructure.

Thanks to cloud computing, businesses do not have to go through the expensive process of buying and setting up servers anymore. Cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and GCP have built these servers on a grander scale and sell them as a service to businesses and individuals. We call it IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

How did it change the infrastructure landscape?

Building infrastructure and maintaining it is an expensive endeavour for businesses regardless of the size of the business. Thanks to cloud computing, this has changed. Businesses purchase the resources from cloud computing vendors as it is needed. Cloud computing vendors have a pay as you go system. This mean businesses only need to spend on the infrastructure and services they use.

Now let’s look at how things have changed for the typical consumer. A few years ago, I owned multiple hard drives and a small server to store my music, documents, photos, etc. Now I store them on iCloud and OneDrive. Doing so has stopped me from keeping hard drives. I don’t have to worry about keeping multiple copies of my documents. Services like iCloud do this by default.

Storage is a small part of cloud computing. It has also changed the computing landscape. A typical user doesn’t have to carry a powerful mobile device to perform intensive computing tasks. Some services, such as image recognition in apps like Google lens, don’t use your device’s processing to recognise images. It is offloaded to cloud computing. Thanks to this, consumers don’t need to purchase expensive hardware to use apps they like. All the process-intensive computing happens in the cloud. This also means developers of an app are not restrained by hardware limitations. Instead of worrying about hardware requirements, developers can focus on building the best app they can.

Why I think it is the future.

It is all about cost savings and convenience. Cloud computing provides convenience to the typical consumer and allows businesses to focus on what they are specialised in. That is why I think cloud computing is going to be the future.