Cloud Services

Whether it’s infrastructure, software, applications, services, products, or even an operating system, everything is making its way to the cloud. As a result, billions of dollars are being invested in cloud migration. In this detailed article, I’ll review the most popular cloud providers, their cloud offerings, and which cloud provider you should choose for your cloud services, from a developer perspective.

Cloud computing has multiplied over the past several years. As such businesses are increasingly transitioning to different cloud services. In this article, I’ll review some of the best, most popular cloud providers and their offerings, pricing, and features. I will also provide details on which cloud provider you should choose and why.

Cloud computing is Web-based computing that allows businesses and individuals to consume computing resources such as virtual machines, databases, processing, memory, services, storage, messaging, events, and pay-as-you-go. Cloud services often improve upon older ones. For example, the pay-as-you-go model charges for resources as they are used. Unlike traditional computing, if you do not use any resources, you do not need to pay. Similar to a water connection or an electricity line, you have a meter and this meter keeps track of your monthly usage. You then pay for that usage at a given rate.

Here are some key advantages of cloud computing:

1. Cloud computing allows a business to cut their operational and fixed monthly costs of hardware, databases, servers, software licenses. Eventually, it will reduce the need for IT resources, including people. All hardware, database servers, web servers, software, products, and services are hosted in the cloud and added to an account as needed.

2. Cloud computing offers 24/7 uptime (99.99% uptime). Cloud servers and data centers are managed by the cloud service provided. Therefore, there is no need for employee management.

3. Cloud computing is scalable and reliable. There is no limit to the number of users or resources. Furthermore, the cloud increases processing and resources as needed. If you do not need resources, you can always scale down.

4. Cloud computing provides maintainability and automatic updates of new software, OS, databases, and third-party software. It also reduces IT labor cost for a business.

5. Cloud service providers have data centers in various locations, which makes them faster and more reliable. Larger companies such as Microsoft and AWS even have data centers around the world.

Cloud computing can be divided into three major categories, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

IaaS offers entire IT computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. The key components of IaaS are used to replace existing development and test environments, virtual machines, website hosting, storage, backup, networking, servers, operating systems, middleware, data, and applications, and high-performance computing (HPC).