Field Guide · concept

Also known as: Cloud computing, The cloud

Cloud computing is computing power and storage provided over the internet on demand, instead of from machines you own and run.1

your responsibility shrinks → On-prem IaaS PaaS SaaS Application Data Runtime OS Virtualization Hardware you manage provider manages
Cloud computing is an umbrella over several service tiers. Each column is a line drawn through one stack: on-premises you run everything, and each step right hands the provider more layers from the hardware up — until, at SaaS, you manage nothing but your data. Picking a tier is choosing how much of the stack you still want to own.

Overview

The defining trait is elasticity: you can scale resources up when traffic spikes and back down when it fades, with near-zero upfront cost and ongoing fees for what you use. Under the hood it is virtualization at scale, run across large data centers — the same technology behind a single virtual private server, multiplied.

Trade-offs

The cloud trades capital cost for recurring fees and adds network latency compared with a local device, so it is not always the right home for low-latency or always-on tasks. It often pairs with on-site hardware in combined-tier systems: a home server captures and pre-processes locally while the cloud stores and serves the results — the model GopherTrunk fits, since the cloud cannot touch RF directly.

Sources

  1. Cloud computing — Wikipedia, on on-demand computing over the internet. ↩

See also

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