A cloud computing primer

- There is so much to learn as to what cloud computing is and where its true value lies. In this course, we won't get too deeply into the technology. Instead, we'll focus on a cloud's primary feature set as it relates to a digital business. Let's begin with some of the basics. A cloud is a large remote hosting and provisioning environment with extremely powerful and sophisticated technology infrastructure. There are different types of clouds, but in this course we'll be focusing on public clouds that are made available to the general public by cloud provider companies. As we'll explore later, a business can even utilize multiple public cloud environments at the same time. Cloud technology is everywhere. If you are online today, you probably interacted with several clouds without even knowing it. A typical digital business will directly or indirectly interact with a cloud every second of the day. Let's highlight some of the key features that clouds can't provide. When we need resources from a cloud, we can get them pretty much instantly and without the need to involve humans. Clouds provide highly automated environments capable of on demand and rapid provisioning. This means that we can get whatever resources we need for our cloud almost immediately, including software programs that help us improve the extent of automation of our own apps. For example, if we need more bandwidth or storage or processing power, we can get it as needed. Also, part of this is the ability to support tools that efficiently deploy and update our online systems without interruption. It's hard to predict how much of the stuff you put in a cloud will get used, especially when you are providing apps for use by the public. For this reason, cloud support elasticity, which means that whatever cloud is hosting for us can scale to whatever the usage requirements turn out to be. For example, if our cloud-based online store has a sudden spike in customer activity, the cloud can take care of this for us automatically, so that even during peak usage times, our store performs as normal and the customer experience is as expected. Sometimes things can go wrong with our apps or data storage in which they can become unstable or even crash. We obviously don't want that to happen, so what clouds have to help us with that is a characteristic known as resiliency, whereby if something of ours fails, another instance of that immediately is activated and takes its place. For example, if our online store should crash the cloud will basically start up another instance of that app to minimize any disruption in service for our customers. Exploring new technologies and acquiring new products from different vendors can be time consuming and effort intensive. Cloud providers offer huge cloud-based technology marketplaces that essentially give you a one-stop shopping experience whereby you can choose products you want to try or use, and these products are then automatically installed for you in your cloud. For example, if an organization wants to become more innovative by working with an AI system, it can be instantly provisioned in a cloud with the click of a button. Clouds inherently support the measured usage of their resources. This means that in general, we can set up a cloud so that we are only billed for the cloud resources we actually use. This type of pay as you go billing model is often assumed to be cost effective. However, frequently it is not. It simply shifts costs normally associated with owning infrastructure to operations costs required to lease and then maintain the infrastructure in a cloud. Regardless, it introduces a distinct financial operating model that we need to understand when investing in cloud computing and comparing the prices and offerings of cloud computing providers. There's much more to the technology and science behind cloud computing, but what we've just covered in this video is enough to set the stage for our exploration of cloud computing and digital technology solutions.