How does Computing get into the cloud?

The question was what came straight into my mind the very first day I heard of the concept of "Cloud Computing".

I used to be a complete novice to technology not until the year 2021 when I started my journey of self-discovery in the tech space. It was during a discussion with some colleagues in a software development company that I heard of Cloud Computing for the very first time and the explanation they gave me of the concept that day did more harm to my understanding than good and I know that there would be many who are currently in the shoe I was then and are curious to understand what the meaning of "Cloud Computing" is all about.

Let me start with a simple definition of what Cloud Computing is:

According to Microsoft, one of the tech giants, Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the Internet. Computing services include common IT infrastructure such as virtual machines, storage, databases, and networking.

Let's go back to what was happening before the era of Cloud Computing. Before the era of cloud computing, the traditional scenario of an organisation buying and maintaining a physical server base on business needs was the norm. The implication of this is the fact that there must be a location within the organisation's business space that is mapped out for housing the servers.

In such a situation, the challenge organisations face majorly is the challenge that is brought about by increasing business needs that would warrant buying more computer resources or more servers which will lead to looking for additional space until there is no space available. Organisations also have situations whereby they get more server space in preparation for future business needs or preparation for business peak periods thereby leading to unused server space for much of the time which will result in tying down capital that could better be utilized for better productive purposes.

The Difference Cloud Computing introduced:

To address the challenges being faced by organisations with having physical server houses otherwise known as data centres, we have some reputable technology giants known as "Cloud Service Providers" that undertake to take the headache of building and maintaining physical data centres off the radi of businesses to allow business leaders focus their time and energy on core business matters.

These Cloud service providers build their own giant data centres and compute resources on a very wide expanse of land across different locations across the world to host computing-based infrastructure and platform services for customer organizations who subscribed to having access to the computing resources through internet connectivity which is priced using various pay-as-you-go subscription models. Customers are charged only for resources they consume, such as the amount of time a service is used or the storage capacity or virtual machines used.

We can otherwise say that cloud computing is the usage or access to another organisation's (Cloud Service Providers) physical computing resources, Servers or data centres on a rent basis through internet connectivity. This is what Cloud Computing is all about.

Why is it called cloud computing?

A fundamental concept behind cloud computing is that the location of the service, and many of the details such as the hardware or operating system on which it is running, are largely irrelevant to the user. It's with this in mind that the metaphor of the cloud was borrowed from old telecoms network schematics, in which the public telephone network (and later the internet) was often represented as a cloud to denote that the location didn't matter.

In subsequent blogs, we would be delving more into how cloud computing works and the different types of Cloud computing deployment and models.