My dad has asked me to help move his business “on cloud” (whatever that means) and I’m having major trouble understanding all the terms given online!
In: Technology
At the simplest level, it’s renting servers from other people.
But renting servers isn’t “cloud”. People were renting servers long before “cloud”.
“Cloud” means renting servers *through a fast automated system*. So if you need another server to handle more traffic, you don’t have to sign a contract, you can just press a button and get one within a couple of minutes. And when you don’t need it any more, you cancel it and you don’t have to pay for the whole month, just the time you had it for.
Before “cloud”, companies had to guess how many servers they needed and sign a contract for that many servers. With “cloud”, they can just ask for more as they need them. Like, Netflix has more servers when everyone is at home, and less when everyone is at work. Because they rent them *by the minute* from Amazon. Great flexibility for them.
It’s not just servers, it’s also other things like storage (hard drives). Amazon has this service where you can upload files and never ever run out of space. They charge you for the space you use, not the space you don’t use. Automated, fast and simple. Again, on traditional storage services you have to sign a contract for the amount of space you want, and they reserve that much space just for you, but with “cloud” storage, you just use as much as you need and get a bill afterwards.
They often have a bunch of side products too, like cloud AI, cloud databases, cloud video streaming. (Nothing you couldn’t build yourself using cloud servers)
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