From the course: Choosing a Cloud Platform for Developers: AWS, Azure, and GCP

Solutions before cloud computing

From the course: Choosing a Cloud Platform for Developers: AWS, Azure, and GCP

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Solutions before cloud computing

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- [Instructor] To better understand how Cloud Computing can benefit your projects, it's worth reviewing the technology solutions that existed before the current generation of Cloud Services arose. The term Cloud really just refers to the internet. One analogy we can use to describe this transition to the Cloud is email. Back when internet access speeds were slower and mobile phones did not exist, people accessed their emails through command line terminals or desktop applications. Today we have faster internet and more online storage. It's common for email applications to reside in the cloud. And for all of our email messages to be easily searchable from wherever we are. If we were building a web application in the 1990s, we might decide to host the application on a computer server that resides On-Premise. This computer would physically sit inside our office, serving up data and web pages upon user request. We will be responsible for maintaining this computer, updating software and hardware for reliability and security. Alternatively, instead of keeping a computer server On-Premise in our office, our web app could be hosted Offsite within a farm of computer servers. We could connect to and update this app through the internet. We might decide to rent one physical machine for our app, or to share a machine with other apps. If our Web App becomes more popular, we would need to make use of multiple machines and additional software to distribute the workload of incoming user requests. Cloud Computing extends upon the server farm concepts to allow us to think less about the physical machines. Management of the physical machines is delegated to a team of people responsible for keeping the electricity on and a computer's running a high reliability. As the application developer owner, we're still responsible for operational configurations and of course, for apps and user experience. The current generation of Cloud Computing Solutions was spurred in part by Amazon's 2006 introduction of Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, and simple storage services, S3. With EC2, people could rent and configure virtual computing instances for hosting apps. With S3, people could store files of any size without thinking about hard drive limitations. By watching this video, you've expressed interest in using the latest Cloud Computing Solutions from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others. The decision to use one of these Cloud providers is not always super clear. We will talk more about this next.

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