What Does Cloud-Based Really Mean?
Cloud-based is basically taking your existing apps and plopping them onto someone else’s computers. That’s it.
Your chunky old monolithic application that ran on your chunky old servers? Now it runs on Amazon’s or Microsoft’s servers instead. Congrats, you’ve gone “cloud-based.” ????
I worked with a manufacturing company last year that proudly “migrated to the cloud” by taking their decade-old inventory management system and hosting it on AWS EC2 instances. Sure, they closed a data center, but their application was still the same resource-hungry beast–just living in a different neighborhood.
Cloud-based applications typically:
- Keep their original architecture (usually monolithic)
- Run on virtual machines that mimic traditional servers
- Maintain the same deployment processes
- Scale through manual intervention or basic auto-scaling
- Require similar maintenance as before
It’s like taking your gas-guzzling 1970s muscle car and parking it in a modern garage. The garage is nicer, but you’ve still got the same old car with the same limitations.