How can a company create an application that has truly global reach and that
can scale rapidly to meet sudden, massive spikes in demand? Historically,
companies had to invest in building an infrastructure capable of supporting such
an application themselves and, typically, only large companies would have the
available resources to risk such an enterprise. Building and managing this kind
of infrastructure is not cheap, especially because you have to plan for peak
demand, which often means that much of the capacity sits idle for much of the
time. The cloud has changed the rules of the game: by making the infrastructure
available on a “pay as you go” basis, creating a massively scalable, global
application is within the reach of both large and small companies.

The cloud platform provides you with access to capacity on demand, fault
tolerance, distributed computing, data centers located around the globe, and the
capability to integrate with other platforms. Someone else is responsible for
managing and maintaining the entire infrastructure, and you only pay for the
resources that you use in each billing period. You can focus on using your core
domain expertise to build and then deploy your application to the data center or
data centers closest to the people who use it. You can then monitor your
applications, and scale up or scale back as and when the capacity is
required.

Yes, by moving applications to the cloud, you’re giving up some control and
autonomy, but you’re also going to benefit from reduced costs, increased
flexibility, and scalable computation and storage. This guide shows you how to
do this.