A Beginner's Guide to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has grown exponentially since the early 2010s and there are no signs of its popularity waning anytime soon. This is because it offers benefits to developers, organisations and customers alike.

- S.V. Rohith

In a nutshell, cloud computing is the supply of computer services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and more—over the internet, or ‘the cloud’. It has revolutionised the current state of the IT industry. Organisations that do not own their physical infrastructure can rent access to these resources, adding or subtracting capacity as needed. Businesses now function in a completely new way because of this flexibility and efficiency, which also lowers costs, increases accessibility to technology, and fosters faster innovation. John McCarthy, a computer scientist, proposed in the 1960s that computing would someday be arranged as a public utility, similar to electricity or water, which is how cloud computing got its start. With the development of virtualisation technology and the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, this idea gained popularity as it made resource distribution more effective by enabling the operation of several virtual machines on a single physical machine.

The introduction of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, which provided a range of cloud-based services enabling companies to rent processing power and storage on demand, signalled a major turning point in the early 2000s. This breakthrough created the conditions for cloud services to grow quickly and become widely adopted across many industries globally. Essentially, the cloud signifies a change from conventional on-premises computing to a more flexible, scalable, and economical approach, radically changing how people and organisations use technology.

Why are companies using the cloud?