Cloud Computing and Its Six Advantages

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Lesson 1: Cloud computing and its six advantages. Welcome to this free course for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, CLF-C02. The exam has four domains: Cloud Concepts, Security and Compliance, Cloud Technology and Services, and Billing, Pricing, and Support. Security and technology together make up almost two-thirds of the score. We start where every cloud journey starts, with Domain 1, Cloud Concepts: what cloud computing is, and the six advantages AWS uses to describe it.

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Our example: a small online store. Throughout this course, we'll follow one example: a small online store. Before the cloud, the store runs its website on its own servers. That means buying hardware up front, waiting weeks for it to arrive, paying for power, cooling and space, and guessing how much capacity the busiest day of the year will need. Guess too low, and the site slows down. Guess too high, and expensive servers sit idle.

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Cloud computing, defined. Cloud computing changes that model. AWS defines it as the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Three ideas matter here. On demand: you get resources such as compute, storage and databases when you ask for them, in minutes. Over the internet: you reach them from anywhere. And pay as you go: you pay only for what you use.

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1. Trade fixed expense for variable expense. AWS groups the benefits into six advantages, and exam questions use this wording, so it's worth learning. Advantage one: trade fixed expense for variable expense. On premises, the store pays a large amount up front for servers before it knows how they'll be used. That's a capital expense. In the cloud, it pays only when it consumes resources, and only for how much it consumes. Spending becomes a variable expense that follows the business.

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2. Benefit from massive economies of scale. Advantage two: benefit from massive economies of scale. AWS combines the usage of hundreds of thousands of customers. Buying and running infrastructure at that scale costs less per unit than a single company could manage on its own, which lets AWS offer lower pay-as-you-go prices. On the exam, when a question links lower prices to the size of AWS, the answer is economies of scale.

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3. Stop guessing capacity. Advantage three: stop guessing capacity. Here's the store's traffic over a year, with a big spike during holiday sales. On premises, it has to pick a fixed amount of capacity in advance. For most of the year, much of that capacity sits idle, and the store has paid for it anyway. Then, at the peak, demand climbs above what it bought, and customers get a slow site, or leave.

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Elasticity: capacity that follows demand. In the cloud, capacity can follow demand. The store adds servers as traffic grows and removes them as it falls, often automatically. This ability to scale out and scale in with demand is called elasticity. You use as much or as little capacity as you need, with only a few minutes' notice, so you stop paying for idle servers and stop turning customers away.

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4. Increase speed and agility. Advantage four: increase speed and agility. On premises, getting a new server means ordering, shipping, racking and configuring it, which can take weeks. In the cloud, new resources are a few clicks or one API call away, ready in minutes. Because trying something new is fast and cheap, teams can experiment: launch a test, measure the result, then keep it or delete it. That's agility.

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5. Stop spending money running data centers. Advantage five: stop spending money running and maintaining data centers. Racking and stacking servers, powering and cooling them, replacing failed hardware and guarding the buildings: AWS handles that heavy lifting. Your team can focus on what makes your business different, such as your customers, your product and new features. You're still responsible for securing what you build in the cloud, which we'll cover in the shared responsibility lesson.

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6. Go global in minutes. Advantage six: go global in minutes. AWS has Regions around the world. With a few clicks, the store can deploy its application in Regions close to customers in Europe and Asia. Shorter distances mean lower latency and a better experience for those customers, at minimal cost. Building your own data center on another continent would take months or years. In the cloud, it's a deployment choice.

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How the exam asks about this. Here's how the exam tests this. A question describes a situation, and you match it to an advantage. No large up-front investment points to trading fixed for variable expense. Lower prices because of the size of AWS means economies of scale. Unpredictable traffic means stop guessing capacity. Fast, cheap experiments mean speed and agility. Focusing on customers instead of servers means stop running data centers. And reaching new countries quickly means go global in minutes.

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Recap: cloud computing and its six advantages. Let's recap. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet, with pay-as-you-go pricing. Its six advantages are: trade fixed expense for variable expense, benefit from massive economies of scale, stop guessing capacity, increase speed and agility, stop spending money running and maintaining data centers, and go global in minutes. Next, we'll look at the different ways cloud services are delivered, from raw infrastructure to finished software.

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