What is the "Cloud"?
The cloud is a fancy name for someone else's computer.
That's really what it comes down to at the highest most basic level.
There are several major "cloud" providers and different types of "clouds" for various purposes.
For example, at my day job I am building an entire virtual computer infrastructure in one of the major cloud provider environments (Google, Amazon, Microsoft). I'm building multiple virtual servers and routers and firewalls to duplicate our existing aging physical infrastructure while me transition to more modern architecture.
You, if you are an entrepreneur or just want to have more computing power for your projects, can go to one of these providers and build apps, or servers on those systems directly.
I mean, literally if you wanted to build yourself a video editing server, you could log into Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services and create an Extremely powerful server in about 30 minutes (including time to setup your initial account).
Others could use some of the native applications in the cloud and never have to build a server at all. There are database services where you don't need your own server you just create your database instance on the cloud and all the server patching and maintenance is handled by the cloud provider, you just maintain your database.
You can also upload and run applications directly to the cloud environments if they are developed for it.
Some of you may just want to backup your pictures or documents and you will use cloud providers like DropBox, OneCloud, Google Drive, or things like Carbonite or Crashplan for data backup/disaster recovery.
I use all three plus cloud sync services to connect and share across my myriad of technology devices as well as crashplan for disaster recovery.
Really, the cloud is just a fancy way of saying someone else's taking care of the computers and infrastructure, or someone else's electrical bill.
That's really what it comes down to at the highest most basic level.
There are several major "cloud" providers and different types of "clouds" for various purposes.
For example, at my day job I am building an entire virtual computer infrastructure in one of the major cloud provider environments (Google, Amazon, Microsoft). I'm building multiple virtual servers and routers and firewalls to duplicate our existing aging physical infrastructure while me transition to more modern architecture.
You, if you are an entrepreneur or just want to have more computing power for your projects, can go to one of these providers and build apps, or servers on those systems directly.
I mean, literally if you wanted to build yourself a video editing server, you could log into Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services and create an Extremely powerful server in about 30 minutes (including time to setup your initial account).
Others could use some of the native applications in the cloud and never have to build a server at all. There are database services where you don't need your own server you just create your database instance on the cloud and all the server patching and maintenance is handled by the cloud provider, you just maintain your database.
You can also upload and run applications directly to the cloud environments if they are developed for it.
Some of you may just want to backup your pictures or documents and you will use cloud providers like DropBox, OneCloud, Google Drive, or things like Carbonite or Crashplan for data backup/disaster recovery.
I use all three plus cloud sync services to connect and share across my myriad of technology devices as well as crashplan for disaster recovery.
Really, the cloud is just a fancy way of saying someone else's taking care of the computers and infrastructure, or someone else's electrical bill.
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