🧠Knowledge Series #40 - A simple guide to the cloud
Everything you need to know about AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and more for product teams
🔒The Knowledge Series helps you plug the gaps in your tech knowledge so that you feel more confident when chatting to colleagues. Clearly explained in plain English. One topic at a time. So far, the Series includes: payments, APIs, front end development, SDKS, mobile apps, passkeys and headless architecture explained - with more topics added every week.
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Hi product people 👋,
Amazon’s new CFO John Felton recently confirmed that the company is planning to spend over $100 billion on new data centres1. Upon announcing the plans, he said that the investment marked a shift in investment strategy from retail warehouse operations to data centre investment. "I spent a lot of years building out Amazon's warehouse retail infrastructure, and that’s what we're doing right now with data centers,” he said.
Given the strategic importance of cloud computing not just to Amazon but to the future of product development in general, this Knowledge Series is designed to equip you with everything you need to know about cloud computing.
We’ll explore the most important some of the core differences between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud along with some real world end to end examples of how cloud computing is used in the product development process to bring features to life so that the next time your team talks about the cloud, you’re fully up to speed with the essentials.
Coming up:
What does cloud computing mean and why do companies use it?
Azure, AWS, Google Cloud compared at a glance - what are the differences between the main cloud providers?
Real world use cases for cloud computing including an end to end example
How top tech companies use cloud computing including Snapchat, Miro and LinkedIn to power features including AR lenses, real time messaging and data analysis at scale
What does cloud computing mean and why do companies use it?
Working in product / tech means that you’re probably already familiar with the basic concepts of the cloud but let’s have a quick recap before we move onto some real world use cases.
Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services like servers, storage, databases, networking and a whole bunch of other stuff through “the cloud” rather than using on-premises delivery of these services.
When you hear your team refer to “on-premises” this refers to hardware that is located on premises, typically in a room somewhere.
By contrast, the cloud isn’t in the sky; it’s simply a description for physical servers and hardware that exist somewhere else. And as we just saw, companies like Amazon are investing heavily in the building of these centres to meet the demands of tech companies who want to leverage them.
Each cloud provider like AWS, Azure, Google etc offers a series of dedicated services which span a variety of use cases.
Just as B2C products compete with each other on features, pricing and policies, cloud providers do the same. And the recent explosion in AI has seen Azure start to grow its market share.
It’s still behind the market leader AWS but Microsoft’s Azure is now a strong second behind AWS with revenues well over $30 billion a quarter.
Looking more closely at what each of these providers actually offers here, here’s a summary of how the cloud platforms compare at a glance:
AWS and Azure both offer over 200 different services which include things like: