Cloud, Containers, and Architecture

Cloud computing platforms let organizations rent computing power, storage, and a wide range of managed services from a provider's data centers, rather than buying and operating physical servers themselves. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the three dominant providers, each offering broadly overlapping categories of service — virtual machines, managed databases, object storage, serverless compute, and networking — layered under different branding and pricing structures. The underlying value proposition is elasticity: capacity can be scaled up during demand spikes and back down afterward, converting what used to be a large upfront capital expense into an ongoing, usage-based operating cost. This shift has also changed what "infrastructure" work looks like day to day, moving much of it from physically racking hardware toward configuring and orchestrating services through code and web consoles, a practice often called infrastructure as code.