What is the purpose of cloud services?

Question

Network administration

Please help me understand what is the essence of cloud services and why is everyone so crazy about the cloud as a new technology? After all, for the end user there is no difference where to store it - in the cloud or on the server. Well, the cloud is essentially the same server. I read the descriptions - a lot of technical details, but the essence escapes. Can you tell me what is the meaning of cloud technologies, why is it so trendy?

Answer 1

I'll explain it better.
Suppose a hypothetical situation, which is usually explained why you need a Cloud. - Do you have an online store of teddy bears. You deployed the site on your computer, which is in the office in the pantry, and everything is fine, visiting the site 1000 users a day, you sell your 5 bears a day, no problem.
But then March 8 is approaching, and site traffic increases to 5000 per hour and your computer does not take out either the processor, or the disk, or the RAM, or the bandwidth of the Internet channel, services processing HTTP requests fall off all the time, the Internet channel it’s full, the hard drive is thrashing, but everything happens very slowly, and you still make a cash report on this computer Z at the end of the day, and in the neighboring workshop they baked cookies with glazed predictions, the machine in the VRU could not stand it, and turned off along with everything building and your computer. As a result, by March 8th you sell only 3 bears, and you still haven’t generated a cash report for the tax office. After such a fakap, you say to yourself: "well, the next holiday I won't screw up like that." Allocate a room in the office for a server room, put a server rack, you buy 4 full-fledged servers and parallelize Internet requests, a new data storage system, an uninterruptible power supply, 2 air conditioners and expand the Internet channel. As a result, by March 8th next year, this configuration can withstand the increased load and you sell 45 bears by March 8th, profit ? But no, you need all this configuration on the eve of March 8th, and the rest, suppose 360 ​​days, one old computer would be enough for you. And the server room consumes only electricity for 500 rubles a day, and the Internet channel and server maintenance are more expensive! profit? But no, you need all this configuration on the eve of March 8th, and the rest, suppose 360 ​​days, one old computer would be enough for you. And the server room consumes only electricity for 500 rubles a day, and the Internet channel and server maintenance are more expensive! profit? But no, you need all this configuration on the eve of March 8th, and the rest, suppose 360 ​​days, one old computer would be enough for you. And the server room consumes only electricity for 500 rubles a day, and the Internet channel and server maintenance are more expensive!
So in the cloud, you can rent these capacities for a few days, while the haymaking is in progress, and the rest of the days you can be content with a weak virtual server for 300 rubles a day.

Answer 2

Billing is the point. Payment for consumed resources.

Answer 3

I will supplement the answers above - not only in flexibility and per-minute-per-second payment, but also in the ability to use hundreds of managed services, ranging from storage and databases to DNS, CDN, etc.

Answer 4

There is no need for capital expenditures for the purchase of their servers and network hardware, renting a place in a DC and paying for an Internet channel. Fault tolerance and redundancy (type) takes over the cloud. You can flexibly allocate resources for the load by changing the performance of individual instances or adding additional ones - the iron does not idle without work.
It is far from always appropriate and beneficial; it must be considered for each specific case. So no one goes crazy for a long time :)

Answer 5

The point is that cluster solutions (a bunch of servers) have become available to small companies that do not have server capacity to serve a huge number of requests per second. Before that, it was possible to rent a maximum of 1 server or fence a cluster in your data center.

Answer 6

Because data is valuable. Who controls the data - he can command those whose data is there. Well, that's not counting such a free bun as the ability to view them and steal everything you like.
(I don't need anything for the encryption and honesty of the staff. Regarding the honesty of the staff - here's fresh news. Regarding encryption - it only works if it's encrypted by you and not on Windows - how much will it bother?