What is Public Cloud?
Public cloud refers to services from providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP, offering shared infrastructure on-demand. You scale resources elastically and pay for what you use.
Pros
- Elastic scaling for sudden traffic spikes
- No need to maintain hardware or datacenters
- Rapid provisioning of new environments
- Access to managed services (databases, analytics, ML)
Cons / Trade-offs
- Cost can spiral without governance and monitoring
- Limited control over underlying hardware
- Vendor lock-in risk if services are heavily dependent on one provider
- Data privacy and compliance need careful management
Real-World Examples
- Startups hosting websites with variable traffic
- Enterprise analytics workloads that spike seasonally
- Microservices deployed in containers
Best Practices
- Use cost monitoring tools (e.g., AWS Cost Explorer)
- Implement automated scaling policies
- Design for multi-region or backup strategies
- Adopt cloud governance and security frameworks
“Automation reduces friction, cloud empowers scale, and monitoring ensures reliability.”
— Viswa
— Viswa