What do you know about the cloud? We are sure you have heard about cloud computing and might have some cursory knowledge about how your company VPN works or how your company internal private cloud firewall is deployed, yet how much do you really know about the technology? More to the point, how much do you know about the cloud based technology you are – without question – using without knowing it?
Call it the modern IT version of the Socratic paradox. If you are like the vast majority of consumers who do not spend their time reading Recode.net or perusing Reddit.com/r/programming, the only thing about cloud computing that you really know is that you know nothing.
Well, in this vein, here is a list of cloud based technologies you most likely use on a daily basis without knowing it and why those technologies are improving your life.
Anything and Everything Social
So, you use Facebook and Instagram? How about Twitter and Snapchat? Or maybe you dig Tumblr and Pheed? Well, whatever social platform you dig the most, you can be sure when you utilize that platform, you are making the most out of public cloud hosted infrastructure. More than any other platform, social media which feeds on the immediacy of the crowd utilizes varying public cloud platforms to allow for dynamic auto-scaling ensuring platform uptime.
With an unknown and almost unlimited quantity of cloud servers powering instant gratification machines like Twitter and heavy quick media platforms like Vine, the public cloud acts as the backbone of social news, the infrastructure driving the army of tweets sent during an episode of The Walking Dead and the architecture powering six second clips of angry cats.
Anything and Everything Streaming
Right now I am listening to The Foo Fighters on Spotify. As you read this, you might be listening to The Rolling Stones on Pandora, you might be listening to Alabama Shakes on Grooveshark or you might be getting ready to binge season three of House of Cards on Netflix. Along with other content streaming solutions like Amazon, Hulu and I Heart Radio, your favorite content streaming services all operate from an architecture of both the public and private cloud. To ensure your content is streamed properly and without any degradation, content providers utilize an auto-scaling public cloud architecture specifically designed to handle growing and shrinking peak loads of traffic differentiated by geographic location.
On the other hand, most streaming services (and social media solutions), use the private cloud to store critical consumer data, protect internal network architecture and to play with new service updates within an internal development landscape.
Anything and Everything Office Suite
Maybe you’re at work reading this or maybe you are at home with some variation of Office 365 open on your desktop. If your company utilizes the Google Office Suite of applications (Docs, Sheets, Slides etc.), Zoho, OX, ThinkFree Office, Live Documents, Zimbra, Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, then it and you are using cloud computing technologies. One of the best advances within the cloud has been morphing the traditional office suite from a physical copy per seat application to a company wide virtualized infrastructure wherein applications, programs and data can be accessed, edited, shared and encrypted behind corporate firewalls.
For the company who has employees working on the road and for the company who simply wants to have universal access to internal company documents with the knowledge of data encryption, private and public cloud office suites take the place of the traditional per seat model. The upsides of the cloud based office suite are:
- Universal document access with proper login credentials
- The ability to encrypt all documentation behind a corporate firewall within an internal private cloud
- The ability of the provider to update cloud office suite applications without making the client purchase new software updates
Overall, the cloud based office suite is more secure, more powerful, more flexible and more affordable than traditional per seat offerings.
Anything and Everything Gaming
Maybe you play Titanfall or maybe you are an active Two Dots gamer. Whatever your choice in games, there is a good chance your game uses a cloud platform to ensure it has the resources it needs to run under high load. While Titanfall might have been one of the largest cloud based gaming releases in recent memory, we would be remiss to say Titanfall is the route of cloud gaming. The route of cloud gaming is mobile platform gaming. From Angry Birds to Triva Crack and from Flow Free to Air Control, mobile game platforms utilized through the iOS and Android platforms have blown up the gaming market by offering both free and affordable games users can play while on the go.
With the proliferation of mobile devices, the mobile gaming market has far and away exceeded anything the traditional gaming platform could ever dream of. Not only did cloud based mobile gaming open up the market to new and powerful games, it further opened up the market to enable independent game developers to develop and deploy their game on top of sleek public cloud architectures.
This is the best part of cloud gaming: through the use of cloud servers and cheap virtual resources, the gaming market has grown more robust at the studio and independent level.
Anything and Everything Mobile Platforms
This leads us to the mobile computing market itself. The mobile cloud based gaming market is an offshoot of the overall mobile market yet make no mistake about it, the mobile device and app market has thrived due to cloud based technologies. The hardware of all mobile devices have become exponentially stronger in the past few years because developers began building applications and programs which hinged on the integration of cloud server technology with local compute resources. These integrations are apps
Traditionally, hardware and software pushed one another. With every update in hardware compute power came more powerful software tools which pushed those limits. When software eventually surpassed hardware power, hardware providers like Dell and HP produced more powerful machines. However, the cloud model flipped this on its head to favor the app developers. With a nearly unlimited quantity of compute power provided by cloud hosting servers, developers are now free to create all sorts of powerful applications which constantly push the hardware capabilities of providers like Samsung and Apple. Whereas developers and hardware once worked hand in hand, because of the cloud, developers now push hardware providers to constantly provide more powerful machines – this is why every four months a new version of a Samsung Galaxy or iPhone comes to the market.
Cloud computing infrastructure has pushed beyond hardware developers and in turn, given the public more and more powerful mobile tools.
Anything and Everything Developer
This leads to the last major benefit of why cloud computing is so prized. Through the use of cloud servers and cloud hosted environments, resources have become virtualized, capable of high levels of redundancy and cheap. For the developer class, application development used to represent a long, expensive and slow process of creation. Now, through the use of virtualized and scalable cloud resources, developers can utilize a staging landscape to build, test and deploy applications without having to bet their house on it.
For the developer, cloud computing has made the act of application development truly democratic. The cloud has evened the playing field and allowed companies like Dropbox to rise from an idea in a bus station to a global provider of digital storage.
So, why should you use the cloud? You should use and continue using the cloud because in turn your use makes your communication, work and play tools that much stronger day-in and day-out.