Cloud Basics

What’s cloud

• Delivery of computing services over the Internet using a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  • in other words: a way to rent compute power and storage from someone else’s data center.
• Pay-as-you-go: You’re billed only for what you use.
  • Instead of maintaining CPUs and storage in your data center, you rent them for the time that you need them
    • The cloud provider takes care of maintaining the underlying infrastructure for you.
  • On-demand access:
    • You can treat cloud resources like you would your resources in your own data center. When you’re done using them, you give them back
• The real value of the cloud: speed
  • Enables you to quickly solve your business challenges and bring cutting edge solutions to your users.
  • In less time than it takes to eat lunch, you can create & deploy a website on Azure
• A foundational building block of everything from digital transformation to the next big startup.

Why move to the cloud

• Move faster and innovate in ways that were once nearly impossible
• Two-trends in world:
  • Teams are delivering new features to their users at record speeds.
    • Software releases were once scheduled in terms of months or even years.
      • Today, teams are releasing features in smaller batches
        • Allows to schedule multiple releases a day
  • End users expect an increasingly rich and immersive experience with their devices and with software.
    • Many ways to interact with devices
      • E.g. they can recognize your face & voice commands
      • E.g. mobile phones, PCs, tablets, VR headsets, webpages…
  • The cloud provides on-demand access to:
    • A nearly limitless pool of raw compute, storage, and networking components.
    • Speech recognition and other cognitive services that help make your application stand out from the crowd.
    • Analytics services that enable you to make sense of telemetry data coming back from your software and devices.
• While migrating your existing apps to virtual machines is a good start, the cloud is more than just “a different place to run your virtual machines”.
  • It can provide AI and machine-learning, storage (that grows with your needs) and more.