Compute & Serverless & Storage

• Cloud is like electricity
  • only pay for what you need
  • don’t worry about how & when power plants upgrade to the latest technology.
  • you don’t manage scaling, e.g. many people can move to town and light will stay on
• Cloud computing
  • Solves management of hardware and software
  • = Renting resources, like storage space or CPU cycles, on another company’s computers
  • Flexible and cost-efficient,
    • E.g. you only pay for what you use.
• Cloud Provider
  • Provides cloud computing services
  • E.g. Microsoft, Amazon, Google
  • Typical services:
    • Compute power: such as Linux/Windows servers or web applications
    • Storage: such as files and databases and blobs
    • Networking: such as secure connections between the cloud provider and your company/datacenter
    • Analytics: such as visualizing telemetry and performance data

Compute Power

• Choose how you want work to be done based on your resources and needs.
• Virtual Machines (VM)
  • Emulation of a computer, like your desktop / laptop
  • Includes operating system and hardware, you can install any software on it.
  • More control and responsibility over maintenance.
  • Cloud provider runs it for you in one of its datacenters
    • Often sharing that server with other VMs
• Containers
  • Consistent, isolated execution environment for application
  • Similar to VM but they don’t require guest operating system
    • They can run on different guest systems
      • Highly portable, can run on-premises or in the cloud with often no changes to application.
    • Takes few seconds/lesser time to start up as there’s no OS to initialize
  • Application and its dependencies are packaged into a container
  • Docker
    • Open source
    • The leading platform for managing containers.

Serverless computing

• Lets you run application code without creating, configuring, or maintaining a server
• Your application is broken into separate functions that runs when triggered by some action/event
• Good for automation e.g. serverless process that automatically sends an email confirmation after a customer makes an online purchase.
• pay for the processing time used by each function as it executes.
  • ❗On contrast, VMs and containers are running even if the applications on them are idle.

Storage

• Most devices and applications read and/or write data
  • E.g. when leaving a voicemail
• Cloud providers offers different services
  • e.g. for storing a text you can use file on disk.
  • e.g. for relationships in address book, you can use a database
• Advantage of a cloud-based data storage is you can scale to meet your needs.