Common Cloud Services

Cloud computing or Cloud has become a term that is used very loosely now in the software industry. It is important that we understand what the cloud is. If we think of the cloud objectively, it is nothing but a set of services clubbed together and being offered by various cloud services providers. These services can be as simple as getting a Virtual Machine off the shelf, or onboarding a sophisticated complex machine-learning algorithm to process our data.

Let’s think of a very simple application. What all you need to deploy a simple application and make it available to end-users?

Deployment for a simple web application

The bare minimum services that one needs for an application to be deployed are server, database, and storage. We are not talking about scalability, security, API gateway services for now to keep it simple. If we go to any cloud platform we do get all these services in common umbrella service types of Compute, Storage, and Database.

Amazon Web Services

Compute: Compute is the most basic set of services provided by a cloud service provider. In simple words, this is where you will deploy your code and execute it. The simplest form of the compute service is Virtual machines. You can provision VMs from the cloud and deploy tools and services needed for your application to work. You deploy your application and expose it to the outside world.

Storage: Second most important thing that an application will need is storage. You need to store images, files, logs, etc. for your application to work fine. All cloud services provide us with different storage options. Customized according to user needs with respect to performance, security, redundancy, etc.

Database: Another set of services that are core to any application is a database. The database itself has gone through many interesting transitions in the last few years. From just Relational databases, we have now a set of no-SQL databases, which includes a column-based database, document-based database, graph-based database, key-value database, and so on. All major cloud service providers have good support for all the common databases and provide additional features like encryption, redundancy, etc off the shelf.

Other important services: Though we have talked about only Compute, Storage, and Database so far, the cloud platform provides many more services. Services related to Networking, Security, Machine Learning, IoT, etc. are available off the shelf from cloud service providers.