Explore the pros and cons of cloud computing

The immense variety of cloud computing services available today would stun even the visionaries at Amazon who reinvented the concept of rentable infrastructure for the internet era almost 15 years ago. The industry's powerful innovations have created a rapid pace of technological growth that is divided into three sub-categories IaaS,PaaS and SaaS with hundreds of services spread across scores of vendors.Nonetheless, when most enterprise IT operations teams think of cloud computing, they gravitate towards IaaS and SaaS. This is because many organizations turn to cloud services to improve IT efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness to changing business needs. PaaS, which is targeted at developers, is far less popular than the other two categories.In order to familiarize themselves with technology basics, users should understand the pros and cons of cloud computing, popular use cases, as well as the major players in the current IT market and how they influence other vendors.AWS initially launched with three services that are still core to its portfolio: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS). Over its first decade, AWS regularly improved the capabilities and purchase flexibility of each service and vastly expanded its range of infrastructure services. These additions include container clusters, serverless functions, block and network file storage, multiple SQL and NoSQL databases, network and content delivery systems, as well as a host of monitoring, management and security features.