What is Cloud Computing All About?

Cloud computing is a roughly 400 billion dollar industry that has completely transformed the way software gets built today. But cloud computing as we currently use it is a fairly recent idea.To fully understand what it is and why it is all the rage, you first need to understand what came before it.

Let’s say it’s 1995 and you’re a young founder of hot internet startup. You’ve a great million dollar product idea that you’re ready launch. In order to release your product, you need some infrastructure. At a high level, this would be all the web servers needed for your customers to access your website and interact with it along with some form of storage to store data for them.

Now, because you don’t just have a couple of hundred servers just lying around in your basement, a logical thing to do would be to go out and buy some cheap hardware. You would hook up all these servers together, set up your website and be off to the races. This acts as your own mini data center.

Of course, if things go well and you start adding more users to your website, your hardware requirements would increase as well. You would then continue to add server capacity to meet your growing demand. This already starts to create a few problems:

• You require at least some initial capital to purchase all your servers. This might not be a huge…