Become a smart-aas with us
Tech word you need to understand.
Nobody:
Non-tech in the tech:
Internships
Business Development Intern - Marqeta, Inc
Product Management Intern - Intuit
Product Design Intern - Mailchimp
Content Marketing Intern - Sencha Credit
Full-Time
Associate Product Marketing Manager - Pokémon GO - Niantic, Inc.
Product Manager, Sales Hub - HubSpot
Solutions Engineer - HubSpot
Associate Product Manager - Jam City
Business Operations Associate - CoinList
Can’t get your head in the Cloud (Computing)?
Super relevant concept in the tech world — we got Gallant Tang (a smart-aas TECHNICAL person on our team) to explain it for us in an oh-so-simple manner 😌
So, with the CEO of AWS taking over as the CEO of Amazon, it shouldn’t be hard to recognize the immense importance of cloud computing in the world. But, for the non-technical people, what the heck is a cloud and why is it so important?
The World Before Cloud 😬💰
Software businesses around the world used to build their own computing infrastructure. That’s why we used to hear the terms such as servers, routers, databases, etc. a lot.
This way of building a software company is known as the traditional server model.
Meaning? businesses needed to build a lot of their own server infrastructure. This is, like, SUPER expensive 🙄
Just imagine owning a delivery company, BUT you have to build your own roads and delivery mechanisms. This is a massive challenge because you would have to think about:
How much road should be built (estimating capacity)
How to build and maintain these roads (hardware compatibility, security, and reliability)
How to connect these roads with their delivery mechanisms (customer and software requirements, i.e. speed/ required RAM)
How you can improve these roads as your company grows (Long-term strategic growth and scaling)
And more! 🤯
Guess how much that’d cost?
All of these challenges are extremely complex and required very specific domain expertise to resolve properly. These challenges have led to several failed projects, catastrophic business failures, and prevented the growth of many companies 🙃
The World after Cloud 🌨
With such an obvious pain point, companies with years of expertise and success in building software infrastructure quickly realized that they could simply start selling computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And that, friend, is how cloud computing was born👩💻
Taking from the same delivery company example, this means:
Your company can now pay to use the roads built (eliminates the need to build the infrastructure -> fast deployments)
Your company does not have to worry about how to maintain the roads (eliminate maintenances costs and cost of permanent staff)
You can only pay for what you do use (capital expenses becomes operational expenses)
You do not have to guess how much road you need to build (eliminates the capacity concerns)
You can grow your company without having to worry about need building more roads (minimize cost of expansion)
Cloud computing has enabled so many businesses to grow without being bogged down by technical details. It has also evolved significantly as the market grows, with more of the infrastructure concerns being abstracted away from your business needs.
If you’re curious to learn more, feel free to look up these terms! (IaaS -> PaaS -> SaaS -> FaaS)
Special thanks to Gallant, our fellowship program manager, for this week’s content.
We asked what’s a smart-aas CS major like him doing in Tech Pod:
P.S. We want to know our readers AND feature you guys on the newsletter to our 12K+ subscribers. Have relevant tech content that we can feature on our newsletter just like Gallant did?
P.S.S. Want more explanations like these from Gallant? Help us beg him lol by responding to this email so we can convince him to keep doing it for us aha.
Literally just reply “MORE” - he’ll get the point.
Linh is so immensely creative with these newsletters! Keep up the awesome work newsletter team!!