Benefits of the Cloud
I thhink the reason the cloud has become an important thing is because managing your own infrastructure (your hardware, your network, your data center) are all very complex and difficult.It used to be that if you were a company that was big enough to need that type of stuff, you had no choice but to build it out yourself.
Well, over the last 10 years or so, the clouds have developed and people have realized "I don't really want my own space in a data center. What I really need is just flexible infrastructure. And I don't want to maintain all the networking hardware and I don't want to maintain the power equipment, I want people dedicated to do that stuff. And I'm just going to pay them to make infrastructure available to me."
In its most raw form, the cloud is the availability of computing, without having to maintain infrastructure.
Caveat: clouds can be expensive at scale
Let's look at an example that demonstrates the limits of the clouds.Let's take email: I would rather pay Gmail $5 a month for my email account than to manage a server.
That makes sense for me as an individual user, but at scale, say 10,000 users the math changes.
At scale people have started to realize it would actually be cheaper to bring it in house and hire on people to build and maintain the infrastructure.
Also, with the containerization offered through Kubernetes or Docker it is possible to do more work with less in-house infrastructure, making it a more viable option.
You have to be mindful of what you're doing and what you're spending and what your needs are.
For most businesses, managing their own infrastructure or applications like email, or communication platforms like Slack, they're going to be benefited by paying relatively small amounts and moving that stuff into the cloud.
Moving these services to the cloud lets businesses focus efforts on thier core competencies - the things that actually make money.
You can see how we used Azure for a project involving drones and machine learning here.
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