Why Cloud and what is AWS?
Tags: aws, devops, cloud
Published: 2021-10-04 08:15:36

Most of us uses the internet to find things and other stuff but have you ever wonder why this kind of information are readily available? Why just a simple type of "google.com" on our browser's address bar will redirect you to google homepage?

In my third year of studying BS Information Technology, we are tasked to create a website using WAMMP, PHP, MySQL, etc. That time, I don't even know how my users will access my website. I just go on and do as I told or unless I will repeat this course for the next semester. I completed the project and my website can be access using http://localhost on my computer. As a newbie self proclaimed Web Developer, I asked my roommate if he can access my website using the link http://localhost (I know, I know, don't laugh 😂 ) and you got it right, he can't. That time, I didn't know about website and application hosting, servers, domains, etc.

Let's talk about servers. A server is a computer or system that provides data, services, resources to the other computers over the network. Servers is one of the key component of what we so called as data centers together with routers, switches, firewalls, storages, etc. Scalability, seamless user management, flexible deployment and high availability are just some features offer by Data Centers.

Usually, a large corporation or businesses uses multiple data centers placed in every part of the world, for example, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. But why? 🤔. Well, in order to cope up with changing environment, continuously increasing number of data and bandwidth requirements, businesses are shifting servers outside of their organization. This will help them to achieve infrastructure flexibility, better recovery option in case of a disaster and improved collaborative systems.

Traditional On-premise data centers involved physical servers located on-site and maintained and managed by your own organization. But, it's not for free and it's expensive! Over time, you'll need to increase based on the companies demand and you'll end up paying a lot fo money for a new set of data centers. That's where the star of the show appears, Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is the delivery of on-demand computing service - from application to storage and processing powers. Typically, over the internet and pay for what you consume. There are lots of cloud providers out there, Azure of Microsoft, Google Cloud of Google and AWS of Amazon. Let's focus on AWS (I'm biased as I am working using AWS for two years now 🤣)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive and cloud computing platform from, you bet, Amazon. Launched in 2006 from the infrastructure that the amazon.com was built for their online retail operation. AWS was one of those to provide pay as you go cloud services that scale base on the what is needed. AWS provides different kinds of tools and services to cater the companies needs and demands. Aside from these, AWS Documentation is well written!

As I've said, I am using AWS for more than two years now and I can say, from experience, it's still not letting me down.


References:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/what-is/on-premises-vs-cloud.html
https://www.globallogic.com/insights/blogs/server-vs-data-center/
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/industry-perspectives/how-important-location-when-choosing-data-center
https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-cloud-computing-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-cloud/
https://searchaws.techtarget.com/definition/Amazon-Web-Services