So what is Cloud Computing?
Like any great question, we need to start with the, why.
So if you've done any type of
professional development, maybe you're in a large corporation.
As a developer, or somebody writing an app, you've had
to wait on somebody else to order a physical server.
That server had to go through some type of procurement process.
And then, once that server arived in your organization,
it had to have a strict type of guidence
around how it should be set up in your environment.
It had to have IIS and SQL Server setup, and possibly any other
apps needed on that server in order to manage it within your environment.
In my own professional experience, I have seen that take as long
as six months just to get a server set up and running.
In today's fast paced app environment, you need to
be able to set up quickly and also fail quickly.
So if I want to put an app into one of the stores,
I need as much coputing power as possible and I need it now.
You can think of cloud computing as a power company.
So no longer do we have to think of computing as in servers that
are sitting in a data warehouse, and
possibly on premise, right where we're working.
But as something we can tap into and pay for way we use, just
like you pay for the amount of power and electricity that you use monthly.
It's the same with computing.
No longer are we using these big metal servers.
In fact, we're pulling any kind of computing power that
we need, across various tasks that we need to perform.
Typical tasks that you may be using cloud computing for, are what you see in the
enterprise or what you see in application development.
So I'll have some type of device, it could be a phone, a tablet, a laptop.
Or possibly other servers that need to access application,
platform, and infrastructure services that are running my app.
I need to be able to monitor these services.I need to be able to
understand how much I'm paying for these services, and then I have other services.
Things like storage, data bases, ques,
identity information, and then computing power.
With cloud computing I have the ability to ramp up
and ramp down the processing power at any given moment.
An example of this maybe an online retailer.
Around the holidays you want to be able to
increase the amount of orders that you process.
And then you want to get rid of that additional
computing power, there's no need to keep it around for the rest of the year.
Maybe an HR system, where open enrollment is now happening for your employees.
You're going to need all the extra processing
power you can have during those open enrollment months.
And then you want to immediately shut down that computing power.
Cloud Computing will enable you to do all of that.
And it'll change the way that you look
at computing services, versus being a bunch of servers
siting somewhere.
To just raw computing power that you can call
on at any time, and as much as you need.