People ask me what I do, and I tell them that lately I work with AWS and cloud computing. Most people don’t know what that means, so I’ve been trying to come up with good analogies.
My favorite way I’ve heard cloud computing described is to simply replace the phrase “the cloud” with “someone else’s computer”. As in, “My files are stored in [someone else’s computer]” or “We do all our image processing in [someone else’s computer]”. It’s harder to explain why that’s a good thing, but I keep trying. What follows is one of my attempts.
Imagine the space you live in. Whether it’s a studio or a palace, it’s pretty much a fixed thing. We buy or lease physical living space on long timescales and are forced into one-size-fits-all decisions. Most of the time you don’t use all your space: it sits around while you’re at work, or while you’re sleeping in your bed*. Sometimes you need space you don’t have. Unexpected guests? Need space for a party? You can rent a room in a hotel, or a venue for a party, but it’s not part of your home.
Now imagine you could add and take away pieces of your home on demand. During the day, you pay only for storage for your stuff. When you come home, the apartment instantly reappears and all of your stuff goes to its place. Friends coming over for dinner? Make a (bigger) kitchen and dining room. Later you can conjure another bedroom for them to crash in. You can construct basically anything you can conceive of, and it’s all on-demand. The upside is that your fixed costs are essentially nothing. You pay for things when you need them and are getting value from them: if you go out of town for the month and don’t need the space, you just don’t have to pay rent that month. We don’t do this with our homes because it’s currently impossible, but with computer hardware it’s not only doable but completely normal.
This is the concept behind Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”). Businesses use IT services to build and deliver products. IT hardware costs a lot of money and effort and, just like housing, it doesn’t always make sense to own everything. Now we can rent what we need, only when we need it. While the cost per hour might be higher for a given resource, the ability to rapidly scale up and down to meet demand means that you generally spend less money for more value than you could hope to provide on your own.
AWS is one vendor of this service (“Amazon Web Services”). It is not the only one, but it’s one of the top contenders. Other names folks might recognize include Microsoft “Azure”, and Google has Google Cloud Platform (“GCP”). I focus on AWS because there are only 24 hours in a day and so far I haven’t needed to branch out. I would love to touch all the shiny things the other providers have to offer, but I haven’t yet been able to justify the distraction. Hopefully I’ll be able to use them in the future!
* “But my STUFF is in that space!” you might object. True, but if you could instantly pack up your stuff into a nearly-free, ultra-secure storage unit and then re-deploy it effortlessly and instantly when you needed it, you could ditch the space for THE MAJORITY of the day and not even notice.