Temporary Computer , Permanent Data
Temporary Computer , Permanent Data
In the last vibe, we rented our first virtual computer. It could run applications, execute programs and connect to the internet. But there was one obvious problem. A computer without storage isn't very useful. Where do you install the operating system? Where does your application live? Where are your files stored after the computer shuts down? Engineers needed a reliable hard disk that could be attached to a virtual machine, just like an SSD is attached to your laptop. Amazon solved this with Elastic Block Store, or EBS. Think of it as a virtual hard drive that you attach to your EC2 instance. Even if the virtual machine is stopped or replaced, the data on the disk remains safe. Microsoft Azure offers the same capability through Managed Disks, while Google Cloud provides Persistent Disk. Different names. One engineering solution. Every virtual computer now had persistent storage, making cloud servers practical for running real applications. But another limitation soon became obvious. If every server keeps its own files, what happens when you have ten servers... or a hundred? How do they all access the same images, videos and documents? That's the next engineering problem engineers had to solve.