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In computer terms, cloud computing is defined as “a collection of Internet-based services on which developers and organizations have access.”
When someone asks how I use my laptop, what are the things you use for business?
I use Windows 10 to make sure everything works smoothly.
There are many other programs like Google Drive and Gmail there to keep your files handy and organize your data.
I also use Chrome extensions to make sure everything works smoothly on all devices (Mac OS X).
I use Amazon Web Services to store my web server files.
I was a little surprised at people asking me how I make money using computers, so I thought about it. As an entrepreneur, I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about this topic, but here is the truth.
First of all, let me tell you that when people ask what I make with computers, one often asks an accountant or a software developer. When you asked, they told you something else. When I tell you the same thing, you understand. It takes a very long time for anyone to come up with a correct answer; therefore, most of us just start talking about personal income. The first company I started after college was almost entirely online. It took me years to figure out the best way to show it to potential customers, because it had to look good. In the beginning, I went to multiple different websites offering free trials, free hosting, and even paid plans. After five months, I made enough money to buy hardware, pay teachers (or just my parents), hire freelancers, and pay myself. Eventually, it became clear who could pay more for it and who didn’t. We were lucky enough to get a bit of a competition, though. Then, there were more than 50 companies who needed servers and space. Of course, if anybody asks you how much you paid for a server, you say the price for three years, and then they say, “But it takes only one month.” However, even with servers, they gave me a chance to see what it really meant. There was no difference between two servers. One had 8 cores, 100 GB RAM, and 256 G drives. Another didn’t. One had 8 cores, 4 G RAM, and 500 GB of storage. That was the real test. Many times, I wondered if they were sharing resources between other users, or maybe were competing against each other to win their money. Even later, this question still pops up sometimes in conversations with large corporations. But in most cases, the actual result is exactly what one wants to hear. A number that will take less than a second to explain.
Most of everyone who starts out selling anything online will tell you as their primary priority – the sale and the satisfaction of the buyer. At some point, however, a few things change:
You don’t know all of the customers in your market. You know a couple of thousand of users who are interested in it. If you have only 1 million subscribers, you don’t know everyone in your target audience.
You also don’t consider the possibility of a new user. Who comes from another country and is willing to pay for your product? Maybe some old people, who no longer use Facebook, came back for a fresh start? Or maybe a young person in his 20s comes back and wants to work on your website? Not just in this case, but also in general, your strategy should adapt to the new customers’ needs.
So, let’s talk about what does cloud computing do? First, I want to cover why Cloud Computing is necessary. And you don’t need to be technical about it. Some people say cloud computing makes a business faster. It saves time and costs. Because the resources (the whole infrastructure) go somewhere else, none of the company, employees, or even local suppliers need to handle all of those resources themselves anymore. Secondly, I want to tell you why I prefer working with Microsoft instead of Linux or MacOS.
It doesn’t matter if you want to create a wordpress blog or a game farm, cloud computing allows you to choose the operating system you want to run and it creates a pool of people doing a single job instead of many jobs. For example, I want to build an eCommerce site. That means I have to deal with PHP code, HTML code, CSS code and MySQL tables. So far, it has been faster to code a site with PHP: I can now have it done in seconds instead of days. Furthermore, many programmers hate it for the learning curve. Most people learn programming by reading papers on various topics. They can’t complete the task right away and they want to do each step carefully until they finish. With cloud computing, they can do that right away. Also, there are thousands of tutorials to teach them. As soon as they finish coding, they don’t get lost. And you don’t have to worry about finding a project manager when you find yourself in this kind of situation. My partner loves building games, and he likes to put together great graphics. He doesn’t understand graphic design, but he knows it needs to be done. So while building my game farm, he wanted to provide the full functionality, such as creating inventory, adding a map, a button, a counter and so on. On the other hand, if I was coding that site, I would love to see it as a beautiful UI that looks nice. Fortunately, the server was hosted on Azure, because that platform is reliable. Besides, the cost per terabytes of capacity is cheap compared to the high price per hour for shared hosting with others.
The last important factor is performance. Both Mac OS and Linux can easily perform tasks. But when you want to run a huge database, or to build a complex stack of applications, Windows always feels slow. If you want to run hundreds of servers at once, with tens of thousand nodes in parallel, you need better tools. For MacOS, you can try Snow Leopard Linux. It used to be a good choice at the time of its creation, but since Microsoft decided to host itself there, it failed at that time too. The next time, I will write about where I can work with Snow Leopard Linux as well.
One more thing, there’s a third reason I prefer to switch to Microsoft Server. It lets you decide how you wish to manage your systems. It’s so easy for me to give up the control over my Mac since I am happy with Windows. So I would like to focus on developing what I’m good at. Plus, since I can save lots of money by switching everything over to Server, now I can easily start looking into other kinds of servers and learn if it’s worth the money.
Nowadays, I’ve already written several articles on this topic. Here are some of them:
If you wanted to have a quick overview of it, check them out here:
And you can also follow me to reach out. Maybe we can develop the same type of tool by combining both technologies. If you have ideas that would be interesting, please feel free to join the discussion.
