November 30, 2022 The 12 Factor App Part 3: (Disposability, Dev/prod parity, Logs, Admin processes)
An increasingly common statement: "We are now in the cloud." - but what is this trend based on?
Until recently, many companies had their own data centers, but have now started to move some of their IT infrastructure into the cloud. What could be the reason for this?
One megatrend is individualization. Megatrends have a strong effect on our society and the economy, and thus also on business decisions. More precisely, individualization means the possibility of free choice and, as always, there is a trend that has a countertrend. This can be of a more complex nature, and the pandemic in particular has made the topic of solidarity and community - the "we" culture - increasingly important. Together and through specialization, you create a larger product. (Source)
This also coincides with business process management, where companies focus on their key business processes and outsource processes that do not belong to their competency core. For example, a producer of soft drinks is most efficient when they focus on making their drinks more refreshing and their advertising more appealing, but focusing on high availability in their IT does not belong to their core business processes.
What is the cloud / cloud computing?Cloud computing means the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. This frees customers from the need to buy, own, and maintain their own data centers or lets them reduce the number of their on-premise datacenters. Offered services are servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence on demand. (Source)
Where one previously had to invest large sums of money into infrastructure one can now make experiments and only pay for those resources which one really uses. There is also the saying that this turns capital expenses into operating expenses. You have less locked up capital that can't be used.
You can also acquire infrastructure and experiment faster, which gives you more agility than before. Additionally, when you see that you don’t need as much, or you require even more, infrastructure than you previously thought, you can change the scale of your rented infrastructure, which provides additional flexibility.
Find out about the different types of clouds in our next blog article on the topic of clouds.