Chapter 1 of 10All chapters
Chapter 1 of 10
What the cloud is
Rented capacity, on demand.
The shift
Instead of buying servers that sit idle most of the time, you rent capacity by the minute and give it back. The saving is in matching cost to use, not in the unit price.
- Capital expense becomes operating expense, which changes how projects are funded.
- For steady, predictable load, owning hardware is often cheaper.
The big three
AWS, Azure and Google Cloud offer broadly the same primitives with different names. Smaller providers compete on price and simplicity, and are a reasonable choice for ordinary workloads.