Moving towards Cloud- The need of the day
A decade back, if anyone asked us “Are computers need of the day?”, our answer would be yes, obviously. But when we ask the same question today, 10 years later, the answer might not be yes. Let me clarify why. Since last few years, we are living in the the digital era, an era of smartphones, smart speakers and AI, etc. Most of the work that needed a computer to execute a decade back can now be easily performed due to the invention of smartphones. We started using Google sheets, docs, etc. in the place of heavy desktop applications like MS Office and started storing our data, photos and videos on platforms like Google Drive, iCloud, iTunes, Google Photos, etc. instead of storing them on physical hard drives. Hence, almost all the work that required a computer can be done by other devices like smartphones, smart speakers and AI.
However, If there were no Google Drive, iCloud, iTunes, Google Photos, etc. and if Facebook couldn’t store your chats, images, videos, etc. or if YouTube couldn’t host your videos, or if Netflix couldn’t stream its movies and web-series online, would your smartphone be as useful as it is? Also, would Facebook, YouTube or Netflix survive? Off course not! You might be thinking, why am I asking such absurd questions!? Don’t worry, I will tell you why.
I was asking those questions to help you realize something. All the above mentioned things are possible in today’s world due to the innovation of cloud. So without cloud, there would be no Facebook, no YouTube, no Netflix and thousands of other services. Surprised, right? Cloud computing is at the heart of today’s technology. Without cloud, even Play store or App store cannot work. Every technology that requires an internet connection to work is dependent on Cloud. Interesting, isn’t it?
According to Cloudflare, the term “cloud” refers to servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers. Cloud servers are located in data centers all over the world. By using cloud computing, users and companies don’t have to manage physical servers themselves or run software applications on their own machines. So behind every cloud technology, there are servers or datacenters running that perform all the operations and store all our data. So whenever we upload something on cloud, it means that we are uploading it on a server.
There are many MNCs (Multi-national companies) that provide their datacenters for cloud like Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Microsoft AZURE, etc. and most companies like Netflix, Adobe, etc. buy their services. Out of the above mentioned cloud companies, AWS is the oldest company. It also has majority of market share (51%). This means that for example, if 100GB data is uploaded on cloud all round the globe, 51GB data is stored in AWS’s servers.
AWS (Amazon Web Services), started back in 2006, was the first company to start lending/offering various startups its servers. The startups could easily lease servers from AWS and pay as per their usage. As a result, the startups could easily scale the amount of storage/ compute power required as their customers increased. This helped AWS attract a lot of startups as well as large enterprises for its service. Some of the clients of AWS are Netflix, McDonalds, Adobe, NASA, Airbnb, Slack, Twitch, Coursera, Samsung, etc.
This year, Samsung Electronics, the world’s second-largest IT company by revenue migrated their database of 1.1 billion users from traditional, legacy Oracle internet data center (IDC) to Amazon Aurora (Amazon Aurora is a relational database service developed and offered by Amazon Web Services beginning in October 2014.) using AWS Database migration service, just in 18 months. This move towards cloud helped Samsung Electronics save 44% monthly database costs.
Netflix, the world’s leading internet television network, with more than 100 million members in more than 190 countries enjoying 125 million hours of TV shows and movies each day, uses AWS. In total, it uses more than 100,000 server instances on AWS. In case you didn’t know what an instance is: in order to run a process (programs/software), we need RAM, CPU, HDD and OS: these 4 components combined together form an instance. Netflix uses various Amazon’s services like EC2, Cloudwatch, Lambda, S3, etc. for its working.
As you saw some real world examples of the use cases of cloud, as well as it’s role in our day-to-day life, I hope that you will agree with me, that computers were the need of the day a decade back. In today’s world of synchronization, smartphones and AI, cloud is the real need of the day.
