Cloud Deployment Basics

Cool. If you've understood Private RAG and how you can get an application up and running on your system. But what if you want to deploy it to the cloud?

Cloud computing has become a key solution for hosting, managing, and scaling applications. A significant part of this is the public cloud — a service model where cloud infrastructure is provided by third-party vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. These platforms offer flexible compute, storage, and networking resources over the internet, allowing developers to deploy applications without needing to maintain physical servers.

Cloud deployment refers to the process of moving applications, services, and workloads to cloud environments, where they can be accessed globally and scaled efficiently. This approach simplifies resource management, enables rapid scaling, and improves overall application availability.

A key part of modern cloud deployment is serverless container services such as AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances (ACI). These services allow developers to run containerized applications without managing the underlying servers. Containers are lightweight, self-contained environments that include everything an application needs to run. Serverless container services handle tasks like scaling and orchestration, freeing developers to focus on their application code rather than managing infrastructure.

Local vs. Cloud Deployment

When running applications locally, all resources — such as computing power, storage, and networking — are limited by your own physical hardware. This makes scaling and ensuring availability more difficult, as hardware limitations and maintenance issues (like server failures or network outages) can disrupt service. In contrast, running in the cloud removes these limitations by leveraging a cloud provider’s infrastructure, which is scalable, redundant, and globally accessible. In the cloud, applications can dynamically adjust resources based on demand and remain available regardless of local hardware issues, offering a more reliable and flexible deployment environment.

Benefits of Cloud Deployment

Deploying to the cloud offers several key benefits:

  1. Scalability: Cloud platforms automatically scale resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance without over-provisioning.
  2. Cost Efficiency: You only pay for the resources you use, helping reduce costs compared to traditional infrastructure.
  3. Global Availability: Public clouds offer a network of data centers worldwide, allowing for faster, localized services.
  4. High Availability: Built-in redundancy and fault tolerance ensure reliable service even during hardware failures.
  5. Developer Focus: Serverless container services like AWS Fargate simplify infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on building applications.

Next, we’ll explore how to deploy applications on three major cloud platforms: AWS, GCP, and Azure. The following sections will provide detailed tutorials for each:

By following these tutorials, you'll gain practical experience with cloud deployment across these platforms.