Life's random bits By b1thunt3r (aka Ishan Jain)…
What is Cloud?

What is Cloud?

Ishan jain
On of the latest buzzwords today is cloud. But what is cloud? Is it something fluffy and what does it have to do with the latest tech trends?

Disclaimer: Currently I am employed by Microsoft, but my views and thoughts are still my own. The reason I joined Microsoft was, the work Microsoft have been doing for last couple of years in Open Source Space. Today I am a advocate for Open Source representing Microsoft.

In the new technology jungle, you will hear a new term "Cloud". If you have not been up-to-date with the latest of the latest trends in tech, you might have just missed it, and you are most likely using the cloud without even knowing.

When people talk about cloud, usually they mean one of three major provider:

  • Microsoft Azure (Az)
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Of these three AWS is the oldest and GCP is the youngest. It is generally believed AWS is twice as big as Azure and Azure is twice as big as GCP.

For Microsoft, Azure is as good as its core business. While Amazon still has retail; and Google has search and ads as their core business.

Then there is Ali Baba, yes the same company that is behind the largest retail e-commerce portal, which is trying to break in to the market outside of China.

Then you have other players like IBM and Oracle trying to be relevant by providing a gen2 cloud.

But what is Cloud?
You can look at the traditional hosting as the gen1 cloud. In layman's terms, cloud is just piece of hardware you rent in order to run your workload; so that you don't need to buy the hardware out right.

A gen2 cloud would be where you have access, as cloud consumer, to some sort of API or SDK to be able to manage the resources you need in the cloud. A prime example would be DigitalOceans and Rackspace.
Both IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud while a currently gen2 cloud, they are more specialized for their respective products.

Lastly gen3 cloud is (almost) fully versatile and configurable by cloud consumer via API (or SDK). While you will not get the access to the control and provider layer of the platform, you will have full operations layer of the platform.

For me a real gen3 cloud has to have:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • The provider should have Platform as a Service (PaaS)
  • Only pay for what you use, billed usually per hour.

While it is true, Cloud is just someone elses computer, a true cloud provider provides a lot more then just the raw compute.