A Gentle Introduction to Cloud Technology
Imagine you are an entrepreneur with a cool business idea that could be the next best thing — maybe it is a State-of-the-Art Language model that can answer prompts just within your own mind, or auto-translator vision goggles. Though you need many things to even start, there is one problem you will be facing early on, which is Infrastructure and funding to maybe assemble the technology you are trying to create.
Did you know that even starting up costs as much as $184,000? (Reference)
Most of the cost goes to buying your infrastructure — hosting your own server, deploying applications, setting up complicated internal networks, purchasing TBs of hard disk to store Databases, and so on. And even then, it is much more complicated to even maintain all of them, and you haven’t even managed to start selling anything! This is called “Capital Expenditure (CapEx)” — the upfront cost you are required to pay for purchasing or investing assets you need.
Thankfully, you can offset some of your CapEx and run your application at a lower cost, introducing Cloud Computing!
What are Cloud Services?
Cloud Services are third-party companies that offer a multitude of services, from infrastructure to application, via Internet. You can rent out databases, servers, infrastructures, and many more offered by the company and use it for your own purpose, and pay it as you go. This is called “Operational Expenditure (OpEx)” — you’ll pay it on a time basis (pay-as-you-go, daily, monthly, yearly, and so on) recurrently to run your business.
Popular cloud service providers include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and so on.
Each provider has their own strengths and weakness, and so many offerings that you probably won’t remember all of them — Want a Database ready to go? How about Azure SQL or AWS RDS? What about a server? You can use Azure VM or AWS EC2.
Why Cloud Service?
- Faster Time to Market — Since you can start your business faster with Cloud Services, you can beat the market by researching, producing, and deploying applications or techs faster.
- Cheaper CapEx / Cost Saving — Reduce your CapEx (Capital Expenditure) because you don’t need to buy more physical servers and databases
- Scalability, Flexibility, and Availability — Increase or decrease what database or server you use, or create even more databases in case of a surge of users, and almost 24/7 guarantee by providers
- Ease Maintenance and Physical Security — No need to maintain hundreds of servers and databases, the provider will take care of everything
- Hundreds of services — From Infrastructure, Database, Server, Machine Learning models, IoT services, Security & Compliance, Security — almost anything you need is available.
Why NOT Cloud Services?
- Require Understanding of Cloud Computing — You need to fully understand every service and the tradeoffs of Cloud Computing before you jump ship from on-premise servers to Cloud servers.
- Higher OpEx — With great flexibility comes great cost — If you don’t understand which service to rent, it may actually just cost you even greater than buying a Server and hosting it on your own.
- You do NOT own the Asset — Because you are technically renting the service, you do not own the database or server they provided, hence you are paying to just run your business, nothing less, nothing more.
- Security Issue — Because anything on the Internet can be hacked, so does Cloud Services. Especially if you’re a banking or commercial company, the cloud provider will always provide their best to secure your data, however, transit data may be compromised.
