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I'm having problem understanding basics of cloud. What I know is that you rent a server, you create your web app on that server and then you use that web app in some website or as a back-end for a desktop application. But that's all I know.

What I want to know is what is the procedure for getting started developing a web app? What extra do I need to know other than programming languages for building one?

I currently know C/C++ and Java as languages.

Google search wasn't much helpful.

Harshil Sharma
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  • This isn't on topic for Super User (programming and software development) and still much too broad to be answered. – slhck Dec 30 '13 at 12:10
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    The edit narrowed it down a bit, but imho it is still way to broad. This is, Bandrami already wrote, that 'Cloud' is so overused and undefined that there is not a person who uses it in the same way as another person. Now the "What I want to know is what is the procedure for getting started developing a web app?" is still broad, but that might be answerable. – Hennes Dec 30 '13 at 19:13
  • @Hennes; so can you point me to a blog/link which is aimed at utter beginners? – Harshil Sharma Dec 31 '13 at 09:20

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"Cloud" is one of those unfortunate words like "enterprise" that got popular with managers and was subsequently overused to the point of meaninglessness. 99% of the time it simply means "hosted". There is a real meaning having to do with computing power as a fungible commodity, but as I'll explain people rarely mean that.

  1. AWS and salesforce are cloud services that you pay to host your cloud systems. Azure is a technology by Microsoft that helps vendors like AWS and salesforce make their product.

  2. For you, a cloud system is just like any other, except that it's not physically in your server room and you'll probably amortize the costs differently.

  3. You just develop the Web app. The actually meaningful sense of "cloud" had to do with the ability to scale up and down on demand, which is not something you want to worry about much at the beginning, except in that you want to make your app scalable (but you always want to do that anyways).

The idea behind cloud was that if your one application server starts getting overloaded, you spin up another one to take some pressure off of it, and spin it back down when the traffic goes back down. Great idea; very useful for some people, but then 99% of the time, people mean "a remote virtual host".

Bandrami
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  • So, AWS and likes implement their platform/product using technologies like Azure. So, if I learn Windows Azure, will I be able to build a web app in any cloud host that use it? I'm actually confused (from a student's POV) what do you need to know/learn to be able to build web apps in AWS, salesforce.com and other providers? – Harshil Sharma Dec 30 '13 at 06:56
  • Your web app shouldn't know or care that it is or isn't on a cloud platform. Learning azure matters for sysadmins and configuration management people; the whole point is it's transparent to the app itself. – Bandrami Dec 30 '13 at 07:41
  • Top build the app, you just need to learn the platform (eg, LAMP or Asp.net, or rails or whatever). – Bandrami Dec 30 '13 at 07:43
  • What exactly do you mean by platform? Even Azure and AWS are stated as platforms. – Harshil Sharma Dec 30 '13 at 07:51
  • True, maybe "stack" is a better term in this context. As far as your Web app is concerned, it's just another LAMP or .NET or rails or node.js or whatever application. – Bandrami Dec 30 '13 at 08:12
  • Make a web app work on your local computer, doing whatever it is you need it to do 2) get an Amazon account 3) now put the web app into AWS and get your URLs working 4) you now have a cloud web app
    • – Sir Adelaide Dec 12 '16 at 03:42