Video – What Is Cloud Architecture?

In this video, Daniel Boterhoven provides a high level overview of why Cloud Architecture has replaced traditional methods of hosting web and mobile applications.

Posted by: Daniel Boterhoven on Fri Oct 28

Transcript

G’day, my name is Daniel, I’m from Denim Development. Today i’m going to talk all about Cloud Architecture; what it is and how it’s evolved.

So, typically you would have a web server sitting behind a web or mobile app. Traditionally this would be a fixed number of machines, so one or two servers handling all the requests and traffic coming from this mobile app. Over time it became apparent that this sort of structure meant that in times of high load on that app, or when a lot of users were using that app, the servers became a bit stress, the servers had too much traffic coming in and they just couldn’t handle it. That would often cause the website to be laggy or the app to crash basically. Because of this, Cloud Architecture evolved.

The key premise of Cloud is that it’s there for scalability. The main thing is that you no longer have a fixed number of machines. Using one of the Cloud hosting providers, they can offer you the ability to spin up multiple machines on demand.

So essentially, you might have one machine handling all requires normally, but at time of high traffic the cloud hosting provider will realise that that one server is getting a lot of traffic and accordingly it will spin up one additional server. And that might keep going on until the the level of traffic is being adequately handled by the number of machines that are running.

Then as the usage drops off after the peak of activity, those servers will shut down. So that’s meant that your server and your app can handle large amounts of traffic and spikes in traffic properly. So that ultimately means that your users get a better experience. So it’s a good thing to aim for.

A few other points, the major players in Cloud Architecture and Cloud Hosting are Amazon AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Services. You might have heard of those before – they’re the key players. There are other players but those three take up the majority of the market share.

If you have any questions then let me know, I’ll be happy to answer them. Thanks for listening.