Part one: cloud computing
Cloud computing is technology owned by another organization, the cloud service provider, made accessible over the internet. Cloud computing services can be delivered in a few different forms or levels of abstraction, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).
IaaS provides access to virtual private servers (VPS) and virtual private networks (VPN) where cloud providers take on the responsibility of provisioning the hardware and virtualization technology for customers. Customers are then responsible for installing application software required to deliver technology like web servers (Apache, Nginx), application servers (Tomcat, Gunicorn), databases (Postgres, MySQL) or messaging (RabbitMQ, Kafka).
PaaS is an abstraction on IaaS where cloud providers offer commonly used technologies, often referred to as stacks. For example, a PaaS provider may offer a Python platform service with a Nginx web server plus a Gunicorn application server for executing code in commonly used Python frameworks like Flask, Django or FastAPI.
SaaS represents the highest level of abstraction that cloud providers offer, but it’s also a rather broad category. In its simplest form, SaaS offers the ability to run user-supplied code to carry out specific functionality often referred to as a function as a service (FaaS). Popular examples of FaaS are AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. On the other end of this spectrum are full business capabilities like internet-based payment processing offered by companies such as PayPal, Stripe or Venmo.
What’s driving the demand for cloud computing?
The cloud computing industry has achieved significant success over the last decade with total revenue nearing $100 billion in 2022. Let me describe the benefits I’ve seen using cloud computing as a means for delivering technology solutions, which seem to be driving this breakneck demand and paradigm shift in how we deliver software.