Understanding what the cloud is

Renting someone else’s server. This definition of the cloud is my favorite as it’s quite a simple definition of what the cloud really is.

It means that so long as you don’t need to buy your own machine to store and process data, you are using the cloud.

But increasingly, due to some leading cloud providers, such as Google Cloud, gaining more traction and technology maturity, the terminology is becoming representative of sets of architecture, managed services, and highly scalable environments that define how we build solutions.

For data engineering, that means building data products using collections of services and APIs. We trust the underlying infrastructure of the cloud provider one hundred percent.

The difference between the cloud and non-cloud era

If we want to compare the cloud with the non-cloud era from a data engineering perspective, we will find that all the data engineering principles are the same. But from...