Throughout this book, we have been concentrating on writing applications where we control the infrastructure on which the application runs and where the data is physically stored. Over the last few years, the trend has been to move away from this type of application toward a model where other companies provide this infrastructure through something called cloud-based services. Cloud services has become a catch-all marketing term to describe the trend of using on-demand services from other companies, relying on them to provide application features, security, scaling, backup features, and so on. The idea behind this is that we can reduce capital costs by letting others take care of these features for us, freeing us to write applications that make use of these features in a mix-and-match fashion.
In this chapter, we are going to look...