Is Cloud Computing the goldmine of post-covid era?
So, we have all might have heard about cloud computing, every big organisation is making transition to cloud computing. So, what is this cloud computing, why organisations are making a shift to cloud computing, how are they benefited from this transition, why should you care about this? even if you are interested, how do you start, what to look for? is there a future in cloud computing?
If you have all these questions on your mind, you’re at the right place, please read through and I hope to clear your doubts in a way answering them.
First, let me introduce myself.
Hi, I am Soumak Das, I am currently working as a Cloud Database Engineer in AT&T, I have nearly 5 years of IT experience. Previously I have worked at TCS and Infosys and I have cloud certifications which makes me somewhat eligible (being modest) to be able to answer few of your questions.
Please connect me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumakdas/
1. What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centres available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server.
In simple terms, cloud computing is nothing but thousands of servers (consider your home pc as 1 server) placed at a distant place from your home and anyone who wants to run anything or play a game or store data can rent them at their wish. It’s like going to the game club and you want to play billiards, so you give some coin, and you play 1 game. It’s the same concept that has been brought to cloud computing.
Cloud computing is related to data warehousing as well. Data warehousing is nothing but storing historical data in a structured format at one place to get some meaningful insights from them which helps the company or organisation to take decisions which have direct impact on sales, quality and marketing of products.
E.g., of cloud service providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Alibaba, Salesforce etc.
2. How it is Cloud Computing different than traditional On-Premises solutions?
On-premises solutions is nothing but your own hardware, where you take care of everything (just like your own pc), you build everything from scratch, your hardware, your software, your requirements everything is taken care by you.
On the other hand, cloud solutions give you the freedom of simply renting which portion of the computing power you need and pay only for that. Once your usage is done, you can stop paying. So, it’s very simple and less complex, you can focus completely on your work while other stuffs like hardware, setting up environments, software are taken care of. There are 3 types of cloud solutions which we will see in the upcoming questions.
Link for difference between the On-Prem and Cloud Solutions: https://www.xperience-group.com/cloud-vs-on-premise-software/
3. Type of Cloud Computing
There are three types of cloud Computing models:
IAAS: Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS is also known as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). It is a computing infrastructure managed over the internet. The main advantage of using IaaS is that it helps users to avoid the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the physical servers.
- Resources are available as a service
- Services are highly scalable
- Dynamic and flexible
- GUI and API-based access
- Automated administrative tasks
PAAS: Platform as a Service
PaaS cloud computing platform is created for the programmer to develop, test, run, and manage the applications.
- Accessible to various users via the same development application.
- Integrates with web services and databases.
- Builds on virtualization technology, so resources can easily be scaled up or down as per the organization’s need.
- Support multiple languages and frameworks.
- Provides an ability to “Auto-scale”
SAAS: Software as a Service
SaaS is also known as “on-demand software”. It is a software in which the applications are hosted by a cloud service provider. Users can access these applications with the help of internet connection and web browser.
- Managed from a central location
- Hosted on a remote server
- Accessible over the internet
- Users are not responsible for hardware and software updates. Updates are applied automatically.
- The services are purchased on the pay-as-per-use basis
There are three types of cloud deployment models:
4. Vendors of Cloud Computing
5. Statistics of the Vendors (Who is the best) :
6. Future of Cloud Computing
Clearly future is cloud computing for sure. You might ask me as how can you be so sure about that ?
I can tell you, the advantages of cloud computing surpasses on-premises market by a huge margin. All the companies who are yet to start with cloud computing are mainly finding an easier way to do move their legacy systems, such as banking domain systems into cloud. It is one of the very risky domain to shift to cloud and cloud service providers are coming up with middle grounds to reach to point where the migration of such databases can be done easily.
But for now there is a provision where on-premise and cloud servers can communicate with each other and on-premises can utilise cloud native services as well.
For in-depth please go through the below link :
7. How do I begin my cloud journey and what will be my benefit ?
Cloud computing is definitely the future and hence pursuing it is the start of a good career.
First of all there are various online platforms who are offering cloud computing courses, either free or for some charge. Once you finish them you can chose any cloud provider you feel comfortable with and start learning about their services. In my case it was AWS as I was working in it, so it was easy for me to do so. You can chose from Oracle cloud, Microsoft Azure, google GCP and so on. Please refer to the vendor list for the top 10 cloud service providers in the market. Amazon leading them from past 5 years constantly.
Cloud Computing courses are provided by below vendors:
o Udemy
o EDX
o Coursera
o Simplilearn
Top 3 cloud service providers are :
- Amazon Web Services(Amazon)
- Azure (Microsoft)
- GCP (Google)
Conclusion :
Cloud computing is the goldmine in the post COVID-19 era. It will have a massive market in next 5 years and definitely a skillset that every IT engineer will eventually need to learn about them.
Hence as it is said, better late than never, so begin you cloud computing journey now.
Please connect with me on LinkedIn for further help.
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