Why Move to the Cloud Now ?

Infrastructure practices are changing, and cloud adoption is entering a new phase. Cloud migration has been a major industry focus for over a decade, but we’re now at a tipping point. Cloud platforms and managed services have matured quickly, and cloud costs have become a much bigger factor in infrastructure decisions.

In this context, IaaS includes hardware such as servers, storage, and networking equipment (e.g., switches). It also includes the control plane and tooling used to provision resources, configure them, and monitor operations. Most providers offer the same core building blocks, but the higher-level features and integrations vary by provider (e.g., AWS vs. Azure).

Over the last couple of years, the core components of infrastructure have advanced in capabilities, and, from an operational perspective, teams have learned to operate in an Agile way. This, in turn, has led leaders in the IT and technology space to take a second look at moving to the cloud.

Traditionally, organizations have run their own on-premises infrastructure, which means buying hardware, racking servers, and operating their own data centers. This requires significant staffing, which increases operational costs. Hardware is also a capital expense that depreciates over its expected life cycle.

The costs of procurement and maintenance can be minimized when you move from an on-premises data center to the cloud. This also helps companies focus more on their core business rather than spending time and resources managing infrastructure that adds little business value to their customers. On the other hand, moving to the cloud helps organizations build reliable, scalable, and durable applications.

A key benefit of cloud is shifting from upfront capital spending to usage-based operating costs. You no longer need to forecast demand and procure servers months in advance. Instead, you can provision infrastructure in minutes, which is a major operational advantage. For example, retailers see predictable traffic spikes on days like Black Friday or Boxing Day, when web traffic can spike by 5x. If you’re running a retail platform, you’d need enough capacity to handle peak load, and that hardware sits underutilized the rest of the year.

Cloud adoption also introduces trade-offs. These include migration costs, the need for cloud architecture and operations expertise, and maintaining a strong security posture under the shared responsibility model. In some cases, organizations invest heavily in migration but see little visible impact for end users.

In this course, you will learn about the fundamentals of why there is a need now more than ever to move to the cloud. The reason why moving to the cloud makes sense, how legacy applications move to the cloud, and the various types of approaches to moving to the cloud. You will learn the terminology you need to understand when we talk about the cloud. We will move on to talking about cloud-native designs, i.e, building applications for the cloud. As we learn about cloud-native architecture, we will give you a quick primer on microservices and their importance, and we will also touch on Kubernetes and its role.

You will get an overview of the various cloud deployment strategies, with a focus on operations, security, redundancy, and scaling.

We will be using the AWS cloud for most of the examples in this course. The reason for choosing AWS for this course is that it is probably more mature than most of its competitors. It also has broader industry adoption and is easier for you as an individual to access.

Who is this course for?

This course is primarily designed for managers and leaders in IT or tech organizations. You could be a development manager (SDM), technical program manager (TPM), IT manager, director, or someone in tech who just wants to learn about the cloud.

The course aims to give you a solid primer on cloud design patterns, terminology, components, best practices, and cloud operations. This is to ensure you know everything you need to when your organization moves to the cloud or when you start interacting with a cloud team. It will also help people looking to work for cloud providers like AWS or Azure, or for any other SaaS service, by asking the right type of questions.

If you are a leader in the tech industry, you know the need to understand the fundamentals of the cloud now more than ever. More than 60% of jobs require some sort of cloud exposure. Some places don’t even call this out anymore because they believe most of the talent already knows the fundamentals. The job market is evolving, driven by changes in organizations.

Why choose the cloud?

If you think about every successful tech company, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have been able to grow and scale the way they have only because of the scalability and agility that the cloud offers. By running your infrastructure in the cloud, you can deliver value to your customers more quickly. Your teams do not need to wait for provisioning, i.e, ordering, waiting, and racking servers, which in most places takes a couple of weeks at the very least. An idea today could be deployed as soon as possible with less time spent waiting for infrastructure.

Also, consider the rapid growth of startups. The startup space has exploded over the last eight years because the cost of acquiring infrastructure to build and launch your applications has dropped significantly. And supposing an app has viral growth, then the fact that you are on the cloud automatically takes care of the infrastructure aspects of scale.