From the course: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Cert Prep: 1 Cloud Concepts

What is the cloud? - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Cert Prep: 1 Cloud Concepts

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What is the cloud?

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- [Instructor] The cloud, you've heard it, it's on the cloud, we can do that on the cloud, back it up to the cloud. It's impossible to escape it in the tech world, but what exactly is it? I imagine you have a big idea of what the cloud is as something floating up there in the sky that has something to do with data storage, somehow. Yeah, you're on the right track. In reality the cloud is actually just a new hip way to refer to the internet. Nothing mysterious at all. We all use it every day. But now we have to consider, do we really know what the internet is? In the most fundamental sense, the internet is a worldwide network of billions and billions of devices. These devices can be computers, servers, cell phones, tablets, or Amazon Alexas. As long as they are connected using the global network, any computer can communicate with any other computer thanks to the internet. And despite things like wifi and cell phone services making it seem like the internet is up there in the sky, the internet is still created and connected using physical cables. These can be TV cables, fiber optic cables, or copper telephone wires. When you open your favorite web browser and type in a website URL, it sends a request. The request is sent to your internet service provider, which is the company you contract with to provide you internet service. Your internet service provider then sends your request to a server which searches for the domain name you requested. If it finds a match it will route your request to the IP address of the server hosting the website. Once your request hits the server of the website you wanted to load, the server responds by sending the web page in little packets back to your computer. The packets are very small and acts like jigsaw pieces that your computer reassembles to load the whole entire web page. So the cloud is the internet and the internet is a global network of billions and billions of devices communicating with each other. And you, as a user of the internet, and the cloud, facilitate the transfer of information across the world faster than ever before.

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