Why do we no longer need a high configuration computer OnPremise?

Few years earlier we used to think of system configurations with around 4-8 GB RAM at least for meeting out basic requirements and if you are a hardcore gamer then that’s a totally different story. At least this is how I grew up in India. Obviously people in other parts of the world might be habituated with bigger and powerful systems at their home.

Being a IT employee at a multi national company, I can say things are no better in office. We are still struggling with computing power at our workplace (at least most of us) be it a desktops or a laptops. But the question is do we still need that? Do we still need our own infrastructure to be that powerful?

The answer to these questions is NO!!

For people who are not related to IT or software a bit of history for them.

With the introduction of cloud computing these big organisations have already migrated a huge percentage of their On premise infrastructure to cloud. But that was back when cloud computing was not that popular and cloud providers like Microsoft(Azure) , Amazon(AWS) and Google cloud was not that affordable and famous. But now in 2018 when we look at these providers they are not only easily affordable but organisations all over the world have started adapting to these changes.

But the big question is WHY?

Simply because it saves money. Previously IT companies would need to invest a lot of money for Infrastructure setup so there was an upfront capex cost + opex cost for maintenance of those servers as well. With the introduction of Cloud computing these costs went down drastically.

Now I am not only talking about productions systems or servers where applications/databases are hosted for clients and all. Yes that is where cloud computing have already made its mark because of its high security, availability and scalability. But for everyday computing like a developer’s machines, tester’s machine or what ever requires high computing power (say a video editing software), many of these organisations are using VMs for these purposes with as much computing power that is required.

Now Virtual machines were there long back even before cloud computing became famous, but then organisations used to have their own bare metal server (hardware) which is also not a necessity now. Because the maintenance of these servers are done by the cloud providers and that too in Data centers spread all over the world for better availability and reliability, thus cloud is obviously a better cost efficient option.

server room

Coming back to our daily life scenarios.

So that was in super high level how IT industry is adapting to these changes and for good. Now the big question is are we adapting to these changes? Are we aware of these cloud providers and how we as an individual can benefit from them?

Many of us are aware and some are already using them for daily purpose but many of us may still be unaware of the fact that we can use the Pay-As-You-Go model in our daily computational requirement as well.

Imagine a scenario where a gaming enthusiast wants to play a very high end game which requires very high RAM and CPU. Previously that guy had to invest a huge amount of money to set up the necessary infrastructure. But things have changed now, we can use the power of Cloud to set up similar server and access that from our local machine with any configuration that is existing say a 4 GB RAM machine with a good internet connectivity.

Cloud providers have started offering solution for gaming in cloud. In addition to the NVIDIA Tesla K80s we know and love from Azure, Google Cloud will also be offering NVIDIA Tesla P100s, the fastest graphics cards on the planet. Depending on the cost per hour, this could mark the tipping point for mainstream cloud gaming.

Came across this awesome article which gives step by step explanation on setting up gaming VM in Azure. 

This was just one way how we can get benefited from cloud. I chose gaming for example as this is something that requires quite a lot of computational power. You can use this concept for almost all activities for example Video editing, developing software, running some CPU heavy software which your local machine or device is failing to run or craving for more power.

So the main point that I want to highlight here is that we no longer require device with sky high computational power just because our local machine is falling short of CPU. All we need is a machine with basic configuration, a good internet connection and a Cloud provider subscription and we are good to deal with every kind of requirement be it gaming or some other activity that needs CPU and that saves us from initial investment and your time to set things up.

This is how we can leverage the power of cloud computing in our daily life. Not only organisations can benefit out of this even we can use the Pay-As-You- Go model, which means that we need to pay only for the usage and that too we can select the exact computation power that we need and nothing gets wasted. Just we have to make sure we are stopping the instances just after we are done with our activity, which is again a matter of practice and getting habituated with Cloud provider of your choice and requirement.

Do let me know in comments what do you think of this model for every day usage. If you think this model of using the cloud infrastructure rather than On Premise setup is not feasible then do let me know why. If you are already using the cloud for personal usage other than office work let me know about that as well.

Till then stay happy and keep reading :)