Expand Your Skills on the Cloud
The cloud services companies of all sizes…The cloud is for everyone. The cloud is a democracy.
~ Marc Benioff, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Salesforce
In around 1960s, IBM had quite a few spare servers which were costing the company a lot! So, they started to rent these servers to small businesses and charging them as per they used them.
Decades later, we know this service model like Infrastructure as a Service and the industry of Cloud Computing was finally born.
Servers have always been expensive. Maintaining them, keeping them patched, physical and software level security of those servers, network security, and hiring someone who understands these servers and can put these together are the hurdles a company has to face if they choose to finally have their own server space. Not only that, the servers have to be fault-tolerant and making sure there are backups and load balancers, and we get to reach all the parts of the earth equally.
These were problems cloud providers tried to resolve. On a barebone, they provide the Infrastructure, and security provided on the physical servers, and much more.
This is how the responsibilities are shared among the company and the cloud provider, and hence result in it faster, efficient products, and pay as you go scheme. So, no wasting money and no bottlenecks!
The end of ‘Fashion-IT’ — customers will only pay for value and not technology.
– Sunny Ghosh, Director and CEO of Wolf Frameworks
The industry is moving towards a serverless infrastructure, and companies are choosing to be in the cloud to serve more people efficiently at less cost!
Netflix, eBay, Apple are some of the giants choosing to be in the cloud instead of having their servers.
But this approach may not be for everyone.
Dropbox became an example of how companies can make money just by working on the frontend. And indeed, they did. Dropbox leveraged Amazon's S3 to deliver a cloud storage platform for their customers, and it worked!
BUT Dropbox saved $75 million by developing their infrastructure and moving off amazon.
So, in their business model, it made sense to not be with AWS or other cloud providers.
Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he has a shot.
~ Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, Board Member of Facebook
Many businesses today are transitioning to the cloud, and with this, cloud architects and specialists are needed. DBAs need to use API and other scripting languages to interact with Database of the future, such as DynamoDB. Even System Admins can use API to automate most of their tasks and manage the cloud better.
Startups can take the benefits of the cloud and build apps and products for their customers with the minimal initial cost, which is way less than what a bare metal server may cost.
Cloud Computing opens a whole new scenario and a way for businesses and professionals to excel in their career.
Getting started with cloud computing is fairly easy. We need to understand a concept like
Networking
Operating System
Security
Python or other scripting languages which will work with the API
HTML/CSS/JS be a bonus
We also need to choose our cloud provider carefully, as they will affect what features we can access, what regions we can work with, and how different/similar would our experience and a task may be. There are some stats attached below.
Let us begin our journey on the exploration of different services and features provided by these cloud providers, starting with Amazon's AWS