Is it still a buzzword? Every time I come across the word cloud computing, that’s what comes to my mind. It is still an exciting concept among the business individuals and IT experts. But, it has now expanded to various industries, overcoming all the skeptical concerns and proving its capability to support businesses and help them succeed.
While you must have heard about cloud computing before, MarsDevs presents you with a simple guide to the concept of cloud computing, so you know what's up. This blog illustrates everything you need to know about the topic and more.
In simple terms, cloud computing involves delivering computing services. These computing services include storage, servers, networking software, databases, intelligence, and analytics. Over the internet, cloud computing helps you access flexible resources, fast innovations, and economies to scale.
As a cloud computing service user, you can operate virtually and be more productive than just processing data only on-premise access. Cloud computing can be divided into two parts: the Cloud and the Computing. 'The cloud' is the development model of the Cloud's strategy. Meanwhile, Computing is the service model.
One of the examples of cloud computing is online files shared through Google Drive.
Cloud: As already mentioned, the cloud is the development model of the strategy. The models can vary depending on the needs of your organization as well.
While other modifications serve the company's different needs, let us skip the elaborate discussion and schedule it for another time.
Computing: Computing is the service model as discussed. It can be divided into three main types:
Over a decade ago, Amazon was the pioneer of cloud computing and the first entrant into the cloud services market. They have usually led in terms of the number of products or customers. Most of us have considered AWS to be the benchmark of cloud service in terms of quality.
AWS can offer a range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. These offerings can be further classified into computing, networking, database, content delivery, and storage.
AWS wins big by enabling a smooth and flexible data collection flow as it uses serverless services, including Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon SQS Queues, and AWS Lambda Functions. It even allows organizations to choose the operating system, web application platform, database, and programming languages, among others, per their requirements.
We can monitor Cloud infrastructure resource usage using the AWS management tools. These tools include AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch, which are used for tracking user activity, and AWS Config to manage the resource inventory and required changes.
AWS can also contribute to the significant enhancement of several organizations' productivity and business growth. One of the few drawbacks of AWS might include the complex Infrastructure and default service limits set following the average user and their needs.
Amazon data centers are the largest if you compare them to the two other cloud providers in 84 worldwide.
Microsoft has designed its Azure platform for building, deploying, and managing various services and applications through a massive network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure's offerings include computing, data management databases, networking, and performance.
Azure Site Recovery helps you enable organizations of all sizes to orchestrate site-to-site replication and data recovery to VMs hosted on Azure. Azure can even offer redundancy for Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) or data storage. They can do that across multiple data center regions.
Azure ExpressRoute also facilitates connectivity of the data center to Azure through a specific private link without the Internet, thereby providing higher security, excellent reliability, and lower latency.
Azure can also promise you extensive networking capabilities that include support for multiple site-to-site connections to virtual networks and the ability to connect the virtual networks across different regions to each other.
Azure has recorded the lowest on-demand and discounted instances when considering its pricing. Specialist developers can quickly write, test and deploy algorithms using the Azure Machine Learning Studio.
Providing an intuitive interface, low costs, preemptible instances, and flexible compute options, GCP is an attractive alternative to AWS and Azure. Google presents us with full-scale encryption of all data and communication channels, including the traffic between data centers.
Some areas where Google Cloud strongly competes with AWS include instance and payment configurability, privacy and traffic security, cost-efficiency, and Machine Learning.
While all three cloud providers offer up to around 75 percent for a commitment ranging from one to three years, Google offers a sustained use discount additionally of about 30 percent on each instance type that runs for more than 25 percent each month.
GCP's credit of USD 300 has matched AWS' 1-year-free trial for 12 months and a free tier that isn't time-limited. GCP's credits model suits organizations that are newly venturing into cloud services.
Google offers off-the-shelf APIs about natural language processing, computer vision, and translation. Machine learning engineers often build models based on Google's Cloud Machine Learning Engine's open-source TensorFlow deep learning library.
Consider the virtual machine sizes that are supplied. They are at the core of IaaS computing, precise sizes and even regularly feature change with each provider.
AWS also offers EC2 or Elastic Cloud Compute. Similar to what we all benefit from with our on-premise VMs, Azure includes virtual machines to provide computational resources.
For typical workloads, Amazon EC2 can provide the following:
They profit from lots of memory, like the programs that process data in memory.
AWS provides an optimized storage option for workloads requiring high sequential read and writes access to datasets and an accelerated compute option for hardware-accelerated processing using the GPUs. Additionally, it presents us with burstable performance instances, a practical choice for programs with a low average CPU utilization.
Similar general-purpose VMs, compute, and memory-optimized VMs are available with Azure to calculate, much like the others. There are VMs that are GPU-type optimized for accelerators.
Azure provides us with several burstable choices in addition to the virtual machine optimized for storage for applications. Here, we are talking about applications that do not require constant access to the CPU.
Along with computing optimization that offers high performance per CPU core, GCP Compute Engine also supports general-purpose VMs.
Like AWS, there is a shared core or burstable VM option, memory optimization, and accelerated virtual machines. However, a storage-optimize option is not available on GCP at the time of publication.
The pandemic has accelerated the pace of the adoption of one and all technologies. It has also accelerated the adoption of cloud computing. We can see the figures growing, which means the crisis was a long-term booster for the cloud market and not just a short-term effect. According to Flexera's report, companies have been investing heavily in cloud services, and their consumption of private, public, or hybrid cloud approaches has expanded across all industries.
To date, three major cloud providers dominate the global market share of around 64% of the market. These providers include:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) have reported annual growth of 40%. They lead the cloud infrastructure services market if we consider 33% of the total spending. Meta, previously known as Facebook, recently chose AWS as their long-term strategic cloud service provider as they began to move away from social media and become a broader metaverse company over the next five years. AWS has also announced vital customer wins across different industries, including healthcare, retail, and finances.
Microsoft Azure has a 22% market share. It thus remains the second largest cloud service provider, with a recorded annual growth of around 46%, driven by long-term consumption commitments. Azure still continues to grow its cloud business across multiple sectors. The key wins are in the healthcare and financial services space.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently announced that $100 million-plus Azure deals had doubled each year. The company is thus recording consumption growth across all industries and customer segments.
Google Cloud Platform, also called GCP, is the third cloud provider that accounts for around 9% of the market. According to Alphabet's recent financial reports, Google Cloud sales have recorded a jump from $4.05 billion in Q1 2021 to more than $5.82 in Q1 2022, with a 44% cloud revenue growth rate.
We can keep data on paper, discs, magnetic tape, optical discs, and even in someone's DNA. However, storing all this data requires a massive amount of space, is really expensive, and some data storage media aren't even for long-term use.
So, the cloud service providers have figured out a way to scale up the creation of various storage techniques that help them produce excellent reliability at a meager price. You can just pay for the features and performance that you use.
The popular types of data storage include file storage, object storage, block storage, and archive storage. Each of these is suitable for a particular function.
Now, consider an object, for example, a file, that helps you with object storage. You can also use object storage services in the cloud and store your outstanding collection of favorite memes.
Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as S3, is AWS's object storage offering abbreviation.
Google Cloud Storage is an essential feature of GCP.
The name of Azure's offering, also known as Azure Blob Storage, where BLOB stands for "big binary object," supports you through your journey. Azure refers to the objects you often use to store your data as "containers." Here, AWS and GCP refer to them as "buckets."
Many of these storage services are similar. They all provide the following:
You should just leave the technologically challenging days in the past. You are here now in this discussion with MarsDevs about cloud computing. It is time to take a step back from ignorance and get tech-savvy. We can make this investment affordable for you.
With more and more innovative start-ups coming up, you make or break it in this industry now. Technology helps you be more efficient. And every business is tech-based. So, they would disrupt inefficiency. Being tech-savvy is not just a tool anymore. It decides your journey.
MarsDevs is the one-stop development shop that takes care of all your tech needs. Proud of our excellent team of developers, we present you with skills, expertise, and overall tech assistance. We can chip in anytime you want, from consultancy to development, deployment to maintenance. But, let's not get late. Let us know your requirements as we book you a slot to discuss our expertise.
