Cloud-based applications

Cloud computing was first mentioned in 1996, but it was not until Amazon released its Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006 that it became widely popular. The idea behind cloud-based computing is to move away from the need to host your servers and other resources needed to run your project, and instead buy time from large data centers to use their computing power. There are many advantages to this. You don't have to make sure that your computers are up and running, that operating systems are updated, that you have implemented back-up solutions for your data, and so on. You can set up your server to be online, and then you can deploy your software on this server and run it from there.

The companies providing these services soon began to add other features that we can use as well. These are ready-made parts that we can use in our applications. What this means is that there will be parts of our application that we won't need to write ourselves. Instead, we...