What is the cloud?

Amazon Web Services defines cloud computing as an on‑demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay‑as‑you‑go pricing.

The public cloud - what is abbreviated to “the cloud” - is hired out servers that are accessed via the internet and can be differentiated from the private cloud - on a private premise abbreviated to “on‑prem”. This is when you have a cloud‑like platform in a private data center. It is more common to call the private cloud on-prem and the public cloud as the cloud.

A hybrid, approach means you use both a public cloud, but those public cloud applications are working in tandem with a private cloud on premise.

A hybrid approach can be taken to control costs, systems, from a legacy approach - there is no one size fits all.

Figuring out costs for the public cloud requires an understanding that all cloud service providers charge for their services on a tiered basis and you need to understand what capacity you may need and what you need buy.

Cloud computing means you can have data infrastructure stored on 3rd party services where you rent their servers and host your data ‘in the cloud’ - or in simple terms you use the internet to access the server space.

The fee you pay is a on-usage operational cost rather than a up front infrastructure cost. The fee can be managed as you scale and you do not pay for unused on-prem server space. It increases speed and agility as you scale up as you can rent space on multiple servers outside your city/ region/ country and continent depending on the cloud services you choose.

The downside is that someone else is in control of your data. You are reliant on the 3rd party for data security, privacy, latency. You are also reliant on their failovers (if a data-centre in the cloud fails).

Therefore choosing a cloud hosting partner can be tricky and shifting from one cloud computing partner to another costly.

Debugging - You still need to hire people who are conversant with the cloud computing services to maintain and manage the server space you are hiring or use a third party tool to debug the code used by the cloud service partner.

Cutting edge quirks - new technologies may not fit your use cases.

Security and compliance can not be outsourced - you still have to have a security policy for your customers data that you collect and store whether on premise or on the cloud.

Cloud computing is another form of hosting that is available for enterprise-level apps.

Why move infrastructure to the cloud?

The main reason to move storage of your infrastructure files off local servers to cloud based services is that these services now can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection.

Cloud computing combines the use of software and hardware components to deliver services over an internet connection. Users can access these files and services through a plurality of devices depending on the use case requirements.

Some of the benefits of cloud computing are:-

automatic software integration
back up and restoring data
data storage
access to different types of databases
data querying
reliability with networking services
load balancing
developer tools - often a better developer experience with admin panels to access services
often a cost efficient pay-as-you-go model
speed to market using on demand and self-service options
elasticity in requirement of resources - upscaling or downsclaing
compute power that is high but affordable
automation
resource pooling which are shared and accessed at a lower costs
sole tenant offerings - higher costs
identity and access management of sensitive data (IdAM) or authorisation (auth) of access
federated authorisation - via social media sign in
big data options
modernisation - access to the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning)
full user-journey analytics (from lead-generation to post-sales)
data transfer and migration
data integration with different service providers