Your customers expect an uninterrupted user experience. As a startup founder, CTO, or CIO, you need to ensure the scalability and continuity of your IT operations to meet this demand. Do you want to future-proof your business and lay the foundation for long-term growth? Go cloud-native! Not all startups actually need to use cloud services immediately, but understanding the shift in computing models is essential. Today, SPsoft will explain in which circumstances cloud computing is a wise decision.
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing resources (servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics) over the internet, typically on a pay-as-you-go basis. This fundamental shift from owning and maintaining physical computing infrastructure to accessing it on-demand is the core reason why cloud computing is the dominant paradigm.
Are you ready to move your applications to the cloud but unsure which cloud model fits your startup’s growth trajectory? Contact SPsoft’s certified DevOps and cloud experts today to help you develop a robust cloud strategy and ensure a seamless cloud migration!
Table of Contents
The Main Types of Cloud Service and Cloud Deployment Models
The definition of cloud computing breaks down into three core cloud computing service models:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is the most basic type of cloud computing service. IaaS gives you on-demand access to computing resources like virtual machines, storage, and networks. You manage the operating system, applications, and data and applications, while the cloud provider handles the underlying cloud infrastructure.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS provides an environment for applications and services development, testing, and deployment. The cloud provider manages the operating system, server hardware, and software, allowing developers to focus solely on writing and running their applications and services.
- Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS delivers software in the cloud over the internet, typically on a subscription basis. Users access the software through a web browser or a dedicated cloud application.
Beyond the service models, cloud computing architecture is defined by where the cloud infrastructure is located and who controls it. These are the cloud deployment models:
- Public Cloud. The public cloud is owned and operated by a third-party cloud service provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud (GCP), or Microsoft Azure. All cloud customers use cloud resources shared across multiple organizations. Public cloud services are generally the most cost-effective and scalable type of cloud.
- Private Cloud. A private cloud is a cloud environment dedicated exclusively to a single organization. It can be physically located on-prem or hosted in the cloud by a cloud provider. This type of cloud is often chosen for strict security or regulatory reasons.
- Hybrid Cloud. This hybrid cloud model combines the public and private cloud, allowing data and applications to move between them. Organizations use a public cloud for non-sensitive workloads in the cloud and reserve the private cloud for mission-critical applications and services or sensitive data in the cloud. Hybrid cloud computing offers maximum flexibility.
Cloud Computing Benefits and Why Startups Need It
Every startup can benefit from cloud services, particularly from the DevOps culture enabled by cloud computing. The key advantages lie in automation, scalability, and security — all crucial for early-stage, high-growth companies. The full list of uses of cloud computing for your business depends on your specific needs, but the foundation is universal.
DevOps and the Power of Cloud Automation
DevOps culture, coupled with cloud technologies, enables standardized, automated, predictable processes that speed up software development and deployment. Cloud providers offer the necessary tools for Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).
The correct configuration of the DevOps toolchain ensures CI/CD. This way, when developers deliver every new batch of code, they can automatically test it locally on testing servers using automated unit tests. If the testing finds no bugs, the Devs can push the code to the staging server for QA to test it there, and for Ops to roll the new product version out to production.
Do you know what is the best part of this process? This all can be done with a single command! This is how top-performing startups achieve 100 deployments a day, instead of 1 deployment in every 100 days or so. This requires expert configuration and a culture of collaboration across your teams. Cloud computing provides this environment, leading to better predictability.
Cloud Computing and 3 Reasons to Use for a Startup
The transition to cloud computing is beneficial only if you do it when needed—and correctly. Cloud computing offers immense advantages, but configuration expertise is required.
Scalability and Elasticity: The Growth Engine
Cloud computing is the best choice when the daily traffic to your product or service grows exponentially and/or fluctuates a lot (e.g., seasonal spikes or viral success). In this case, planning dedicated server resource capacities becomes hard, if not impossible.
- On-Demand Compute Capacity. In the cloud, you scale the cloud infrastructure up or down in a matter of minutes. With DevOps tools like Kubernetes, it can be done in seconds. Your cloud infrastructure will always have sufficient compute capacity to handle the workload. Services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Google Cloud virtual machines allow automated provisioning of additional instances to meet demand spikes. This elasticity is a core benefit of cloud computing.
- Serverless and Spot Instances. Modern cloud computing uses serverless computing options (like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions) for event-driven models, meaning computing power is only consumed during code execution. For non-critical, fault-tolerant workloads in the cloud (like batch processing or testing), providers offer Spot Instances at huge discounts, maximizing the efficient use of cloud resources. This optimization is impossible to achieve with a single dedicated server.
BUT: You don’t need cloud computing resources during MVP development. A couple of dedicated servers can suffice. However, it’s best to start building your product using DevOps tools like Pulumi, Kubernetes, and Docker, making it cloud-native. Thereafter, the transition of your web applications to the public cloud or private cloud will not take much time, investment, and effort once you need to scale up.
Cost-Efficiency and FinOps: Paying for Value
With dedicated servers, you pay for the full capacity of your computing infrastructure, regardless of how intensely you use it. Cloud computing helps optimize these costs through the pay-as-you-go model.
- Pay-as-you-go Model. With cloud computing, you only pay for the computing resources you have actually consumed. This helps startups manage capital expenditures and shift to an operational expenditure (OpEx) model, which improves financial flexibility. Cloud services are generally cheaper upfront.
- FinOps Culture. The modern approach to cloud management is FinOps, which aligns finance, business, and engineering teams. This involves continuous monitoring to identify idle and underutilized resources (like unused VMs or unattached storage volumes), utilizing tiered storage (moving old logs to cold storage for savings), and leveraging discounts like Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for predictable workloads in the cloud. This continuous optimization is necessary because the dynamic pricing models of the cloud provider’s offerings can otherwise lead to unpredictable costs.
- Managed Services. Cloud providers offer managed services for databases (like AWS RDS or Google Cloud SQL) and analytics, eliminating the need for expensive, dedicated in-house operations teams for tasks like patching and maintenance.
BUT: Cloud computing resources are virtualized, so the process of scaling is nearly instant. Thus, an incorrect configuration of some operations in the production environment can result in multi-million dollar bills from major cloud providers like AWS. Cloud management expertise is non-negotiable, and budget alerts must be configured to prevent spending overruns.
Cybersecurity and Compliance: Enterprise-Grade Protection
Cloud computing providers offer the strongest multi-layered security for applications and services, data in the cloud, and networks. Cloud security spans from single container security to advanced network policies.
- Shared Responsibility Model. Cloud security is a shared responsibility: the cloud service provider secures the cloud infrastructure (the servers, storage, and networking hardware), and the customer secures the applications and services and data in the cloud (access control, encryption, OS patching). This model allows startups to immediately inherit a vast, secure foundation.
- Compliance Inheritance. Cloud providers typically manage compliance for many global standards (like PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, ISO 27001), helping cloud customers satisfy regulatory requirements. For instance, AWS supports over 143 security standards. This feature is particularly valuable for startups entering regulated industries (e.g., FinTech or HealthTech), as the compliance burden is drastically reduced.
- Advanced Features. Cloud security measures include secret management tools, Bastion hosts, Kubernetes cluster security policies, and robust threat detection. If correctly configured, these measures are nearly impenetrable.
BUT: Cloud security is a complex system with multiple moving parts. Configuration mistakes due to lack of experience can result in severe data security breaches. Remember the infamous CIA Vault 7 data breach? It happened because the CIA’s in-house cybersecurity team members were more interested in hacking Apple than in protecting their own data. This is why many organizations prefer engaging in cloud security contracts from certified professionals to manage their cloud deployment and configurations.
The Power of Multi-Cloud and Interoperability
As startups mature, they may transition to a multi-cloud approach, using multiple cloud providers (like Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud or Google Cloud) simultaneously.
- Vendor Lock-in Mitigation. By hosting data and applications across two or more cloud providers, a startup reduces its dependence on any one cloud, increasing negotiation power and reducing the risk of a single point of failure.
- Best-of-Breed Services. Different cloud providers offer specialized cloud technologies. A startup might use Google Cloud for its AI/ML services (like Vertex AI) and AWS for its core infrastructure as a service (IaaS) needs. This strategic use of different cloud services helps startups innovate faster.
- Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud. While a hybrid cloud model focuses on integrating public or private cloud alone, multicloud involves using two or more cloud service providers, often in an independent configuration. This flexibility is key to global expansion.
The cloud is one of the most powerful tools available to startups. By understanding the intricacies of the cloud model and leveraging expertise in cloud migration and cloud management, founders can ensure their business is built for success.
Cloud Computing Is Good for a Startup! (Beyond Cost and Scale)
We have briefly covered the main “pros and cons” of cloud computing already. However, returning to the beginning of the article, we can surely say that moving to the cloud is a wise decision for any startup when the time is right — and here is why:
Development Benefits
- Software Development Speed. The process of software development involves creating and configuring multiple environments. Cloud computing resources are virtualized, allowing launching containers with required runtime in seconds, greatly decreasing waiting time. As a result, overall software development time becomes much shorter.
- Software Testing Reliability. Cloud computing provides the resources for storing vast libraries of automated tests. Bug discovery is much faster and more reliable, as most bugs are found very early in the development process.
- Software Release Replicability. When developers write, build, and test the code within Docker containers, dev, testing, and staging environments in the cloud platform are exactly the same as in production. This gets rid of a “works well on my machine” situation.
- Software Release Predictability. Using tools like Ansible, Jenkins, or Travis CI simplifies software release practices like Blue-Green deployment or Canary releases in the cloud environment. Rollback strategies are quite simple to implement in virtualized cloud environments.
Product Benefits
- Product Availability. Due to the scalability of cloud resources, you can configure automated provisioning of additional instances to meet customer demand spikes. This way, you ensure product availability without wasting a fortune on cloud infrastructure.
- Mean TTR Reduction. Mean Time To Resolution is much shorter in the cloud. This is possible due to cloud platforms offering advanced monitoring, alerting, and logging tools.
- Uninterrupted Positive Customer Experience. When your product is well-designed, performs reliably, and developers roll out new features at a steady pace — you get a positive customer experience as a result. This is the basis for lasting business success.
That is just the tip of the iceberg. The full list of uses of cloud computing for your business depends on the industry, stage of operational maturity, and the level of technical expertise at your disposal.
Conclusions: The Cloud Mandate
To conclude, the transition to the cloud is an important step in every startup’s lifecycle. If you are operating on a limited budget, you will need this step to go global. Cloud computing provides multiple technical and business benefits of cloud computing if your team configures everything correctly and you are able to pay the fees.
However, you need to have access to the technical expertise to get things done right. Unfortunately, such expertise is hard to come by, as the demand for skilled DevOps engineers surpasses their availability. Thus, the choice is not whether to move to the cloud or not—the choice is WHEN to do it and HOW to do it in the best way possible. Use our cloud expertise to ensure your success.
Don’t risk costly configuration mistakes with your applications to the cloud. Contact SPsoft’s DevOps and cloud experts today to build a resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud architecture that guarantees long-term success for your business!
FAQ
What are the main types of cloud computing services, and what is the best type of cloud computing for a new startup?
The main types of cloud computing services are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). The best type of cloud computing for a new startup is often SaaS (for off-the-shelf tools like CRM) and PaaS for web applications development, as PaaS abstracts the underlying OS and infrastructure, allowing a small development team to focus on code and speed up time-to-market.
How is a hybrid cloud model different from simply using multiple cloud providers?
A hybrid cloud model specifically integrates a public cloud and a private cloud, enabling automated resource sharing and data portability between the two. Using multiple cloud providers (multicloud) means relying on two or more cloud service providers (like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services) independently, often to avoid vendor lock-in or leverage specific geographical offerings. A hybrid cloud is a specific cloud deployment strategy, while multicloud is a broader cloud strategy.
What is serverless computing, and why is it beneficial for early-stage startups?
Serverless computing is a type of cloud computing where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of computing power and backend infrastructure. Serverless computing allows developers to focus purely on code; they do not provision, scale, or manage any servers. It’s highly beneficial for startups because it provides maximum cost-efficiency (you only pay when your code runs) and infinite scalability without any cloud management overhead.
What are the key risks of cloud migration without a solid cloud architecture?
The key risks of cloud migration without a solid cloud architecture include unexpected high costs (due to resource misconfiguration), compliance failure (due to not applying proper security to applications and services), and data exposure. Moving applications to the cloud requires designing a new cloud model that utilizes auto-scaling and elasticity, rather than simply recreating the old on-prem setup in the cloud environment.
What are the biggest major cloud cloud providers today, and why might a startup use multiple cloud services?
The biggest major cloud providers today are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud (GCP). A startup might use multiple cloud providers (multicloud) to avoid vendor lock-in, leverage unique cloud technologies offered by different cloud providers (e.g., specialized AI on Google Cloud), or meet geographical data residency requirements. Some companies are using the cloud for specific functions, such as hosting their main cloud application on one cloud but using another for backup.
What is the difference between IaaS and PaaS, and how do they relate to cloud computing service models?
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model that provides virtualized computing resources (VMs, storage), giving the customer maximum control over the OS and runtime. Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides a complete platform as a service environment for development and deployment, abstracting the OS layer entirely. Both are foundational types of cloud computing services that define how the customer interacts with the cloud infrastructure.
What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and how does it fit into the public cloud market?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a competitive public cloud offering from Oracle Cloud that has gained traction by focusing on enterprise-grade performance, high availability, and specialized support for Oracle’s databases and applications. OCI competes directly with other public cloud providers by offering similar infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities, often aiming for large enterprises looking for favorable pricing and performance guarantees.
Why is cloud security considered a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the customer?
Cloud security is a shared responsibility because, while the cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud (physical infrastructure, network security, and global cloud infrastructure), the customer is responsible for security in the cloud. The customer must manage and configure access controls, encryption, operating systems, and applications to the cloud. A lapse in customer configuration is often what leads to breaches, even in the most secure public cloud environment.
