Cloud what??? - (Azure - Part 1)

So, just now, you have mastered your preferred language, framework and technology. But before the dust settles down, you are hearing organization’s push towards ‘Cloud Computing’. Now what's this??? You must be wondering, whose need is it anyway? Is it just a new gimmick or simply another buzzword to nicely decorate your resume.
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So, lets take couple of examples to understand why would somebody use cloud computing.
Scenario (1)
Lets say I'm launching a site that provides information, snaps and videos of ongoing 20-20 cricket matches. Now I have my web site up and ready. If I'm opting traditional hosting with some ISP, I have to provision for the hardware/software requirement considering the peak activity. This means when the matches are going on, around 50,000 user might be using the data for 24 hours, and it will also require very high in and out bandwidth. Suppose I invest, considering this peak activity, most of the time, this capacity will be unused. Especially, when there are no cricket matches or once the 20-20 series is over.

Scenario (2)
Take another example. Imagine, you are a developer, struck by an idea in the midnight, about a new wonderful application (ofcourse wonderful. Everything looks so, atleast in its inception phase). It is going to provide awsome facility to its users and you in return are going to reap good amount of profit. But the problem is how and how much would you invest in infrastructure. How much would it be sufficient? Are you going to buy server class machines on your own? What will you do with the infra later? Or what to do with all those machines if you don't get sufficient users?

So, imagine a cloud computing as a solution for this. Imagine there is somebody out there, in cloud, who is providing everything that you'll require, on rent. Now your application is able to handle the peak time activity. And on the other hand, you charged only for what you have use. just like the latest cellphone-plan's "1 paisa billing". Isn't that amazing? Taking everything on rent and paying only for what you require, dynamically. At this stage, we will see it is as means of "Paying only for the computing, storage, bandwidth that you have used".

We will cover it in more details in next post. Till that time evaluate cloud computing with Dilbert.