What is Cloud?
Why do you think “cloud” has been widely spoken of since the Age of the Internet? Why are companies “migrating towards cloud”? Why are cloud engineers in demand in the present day? The answer to all these questions lies in understanding what cloud computing is.
So, let us start with the word “cloud”.
“The cloud refers to servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers”.
This is how the Internet defines cloud. If we further simplify this definition, it means “some work done using the internet”. This definition answers the very first question of this blog — why is cloud related to the internet. And why is this technology or service called cloud? The Internet says that it is because of the logo such services held in software diagrams. But I like to relate it to the rain clouds — clouds(servers) give us rain(resources/services) from/through the sky(Internet).
Cloud is so deeply engraved into our lives, but we fail to notice it many a times. Take our favorite WhatsApp messenger for instance. You send a message to your friend and he/she receives it. Have you ever thought about where your messages are stored? When you reinstall WhatsApp, don’t you see prompt that asks you if you need your messages backed up? If you choose to retrieve your messages, where do they come from? Did you not lose them when you uninstalled the app? Well, enter the hero of our blog, the Cloud.
When you send a message to your friend, a copy of it is stored in Facebook’s data center or server, provided you chose to create a back up. So all your messages are safely stored in a space that is dedicated to you, and when you want them back, you get them. Can you do this with your mobile data switched off? Well since that is not possible, of course you “access your messages from the server through the Internet”. This phrase sounds familiar right? Go back and check out the definition of cloud we saw.
The best way to understand cloud is to feel what it can do and how it does that. This is just one small example to show the importance of cloud in our everyday life. So if you think about this again, you don’t know how this is happening right? Do you know where your messages are stored? How are they stored? How are they kept secure? It is internet right, then what if someone steals it? You see cloud comes with a lot of responsibility, and cloud engineers are responsible for all of this. This answers another question that we started our journey with- the importance of cloud professionals.
There are plenty of other instances where we use cloud. Heard of Spotify? Where does the music come from? It is stored in a server and retrieved via the internet. How about Google Drive? You store a lot of stuff there right, and do you know how or where it is stored? Cloud has indeed become an inevitable part of our lives. It is so interesting to think about how things are done using the cloud. I encourage you to go ahead and find more such examples and learn about cloud.
I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
