As a normal person who doesn’t know much about electronics, one thinks of the cloud, and just thinks it’s a convenient service to have access to your “stuff” anywhere you want. So in theory you could take a picture on your camera and use Google Drive and be able to access it on your laptop/computer/mobile or log-in to your account at the school’s computer and have access to it. But in all honestly is that all? in this blog I will be discussing the different things I found out while I did some reading, also what different services there are out there and how much they would cost to have lets say a simple website with a database.
What is the Cloud
Cloud could be looked as a multiple of services being stored somewhere else and you as a costumer choose a service you want and get access to those services, so you don’t have to have it on your computer you can have it online. There are many servies: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS… but what do those abreviations mean?
IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service, here is where you grab somethings from the service like the basics in order to build a website, but you have to write the code and structure the final product. So you can use the cloud’s storage, the operating systems, but you have to know how to use them and build your application yourself.
PaaS
Platform as a Service, its a ready to use platform for your code, so you get the stuff you get in IaaS plus you get other things that come with it like the database, and other tools you need. You however still have the responsability to tweek and change things as time passes by.
And if we were to compare Saas where you get the software already done and delivered, with PaaS you are given a platform where you can create the finish software.
SaaS
Software as a service, this is a ready and done deal, you go in and choose what you want, you as a costumer aren’t required to write or know about code, you just buy the finish product. A good example would be Office 365. So you pay to use the software, but you don’t own it, you are per say renting it.
What are the pros and cons of using Cloud services?
| Pros |
Cons |
| Good collaboration between workers |
The need of being online/having internet |
| Easily accessible |
Data loss or theft |
| Low maintanance cost |
data being leaked |
| Back-up and restore data becoming easy |
|
Different Cloud providers and the pricing
Here I will be comparing the top 3 cloud providers in the world plus 1 more additional european provider. This is for a simple website and database, that runs every day for a year, I tried to search for the same specs 2 CPUs, 8GB RAM och 10 GB disk space in a Linux server in Europe, I tried to locate them all for north europe to make sure the prices wouldn’t be different because of it.
In conclusion most of them are about the same price even the smaller one (Digital Ocean) so I think now days they are fairly affordable.
References
Is the cloud really just somone else’s computer
Cloud computing tutorial for beginers
SaaS vs PaaS vs IaaS