Assuming this will be an easy answer to my question, but what exactly is the cloud (server) along with the hard drive? Ive done some research but am looking for an answer by hopefully some of of you instead.
The image below is what imagine the hard drive to be and that there are many hard drives. owned by apple, fb, google, any major tech companies. and that the cloud is the data storage that each of these hard drives hold? is this theory of mine correct?
I’m not sure where this diagram is from or how accurate it is. Something like why is the developer’s computer debugging the developer is highly suspicious. Or why the icon for the hard drive is the same as the developer’s computer.
My assumption is the hard drive is split off from the “server” (which is really generic) **due to most PaaS (Platform as a Service) scaling usually not including system memory, and thus not allowing you access to the file system what-so-ever. This means “external memory”/“hard drive” needs to be managed in an external system, such as a dedicated database platform, or a dedicated file-system.
For example, if you’re using Heroku’s platform you’d create an app, you can’t access the file-system and will need to use external systems to save data.
The reasoning for this for PaaS systems is that if the system “goes to sleep” the file system is 100% deleted. Or if you scale up, the app can be ran on another system without worrying about the actual file system files needing to be duplicated.
The only other guess is that “hard drive” actually represents an external database.
A server is an online storage and computational resource that can be accessed via the internet and is used distributes or “servs” data to user - as their purpose is to serve data via requests send by computers, servers also generally have a very slim operating system (usually Linux) AND as you can actually “not” see in the image, they don’t have their own periphery → no screen, mouse or keyboard. Instead one of the requests actually allows interacting with the server with login information usually only known to the server-admins.
And a hard drive is literally a physical device to store data. A USB-stick is a hard-drive.
A “cloud” refers to the fact that user cannot only request data from the machine, but actually use it for their personal projects.
Like, this website is also saved on a server. But we as users cannot put a lot of personal data onto it nor access computational resource.
However in a cloud storage like the Google-Drive, I can store tons of data and access it from anywhere I have internet access. Cloud computing goes a step further and allows the users to also have computational actions of their own making executed on the server.
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