Currently i am trying to learn various Services of Amazon web services and Microsoft windows azure like Amazon sns,Amazon Storage,amazon Search.
I am having some question in my mind that why now a days cloud platforms are getting so popular than old traditional approach like previously we were storing our files(img,txt,.doc etc) in our web application project only but now adays some web application are storing their files on amazon storage or on azure storage.
What is the benefits of storing files and folders over cloud platform ??
Next why amazon search or azure search is preferred as when they were not available searching was done and amazon and azure search are not freely availabale??
Now if we talk about push notification then why to use amazon or azure push notification if we can easily send notification through codes that are available on internet??
I general i just want to know that why now a days web application are using more cloud platforms(Azure or amazon) even though they are costly??
Can anybody explain me this with some details??
Among the many reasons, the most important and common ones I can think of are:
High Availability - When you manage your own services, there is always an operational challenge of ensuring that they do not go down i.e, crash. This may cause a downtime to your application or even data loss depending on the situation. The cloud services you have mentioned, offer reliable solutions that guarantee maximum up time and data safety (by backup, for example). They often replicate your data across multiple servers, so that even if one of their servers are down, you do not loose any data.
Ease of use - Cloud services make it very easy to use a specific service by providing detailed documentation and client libraries to use their services. The dashboard or console of many cloud services are often user friendly and do not require extensive technical background to use. You could deploy a Hadoop cluster in Google Compute Engine in less than a minute, for instance. They offer many pre-built solutions which you can take advantage of.
Auto-Scale - Many cloud services nowadays are designed to scale automatically. The are built to scale automatically with increasing traffic. You do not have to worry about the traffic or application load.
Security - Cloud services are secure. They offer sophisticated security solutions using which, you can secure your service from being misused.
Cost - Trying to host your own services require extensive resources like high end servers, dedicated system administrators, good network connectivity etc. Cloud services are quite cheap these days.
Of course you could solve these problems yourself, but smaller organizations often do not prefer to do so because of the operational overhead. It would take more time and resources to reach a stage where your solution is both reliable and functional. People would often prefer to work on the actual problem their application is trying to solve and abstract away most operational problems which cloud services readily offer.
p.s. These are some opinions from an early stage startup perspective.