These days, you will hear a lot of buzz around cloud computing. There are many competing cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud. Today, it is very likely that you are already using some kind of cloud platform at home. For example, in the past, there was Blockbuster, where you had to walk into the store to rent and return movies. However, walking into a store and renting and returning movies could be very time consuming. Nowadays, you can simply pay a monthly flat fee to Netflix and watch as many movies as you like, in the comfort of your home. Similarly, in order to deploy a web service like the Fortune Cookie webhook, you would need to build a physical server, place the server in a data center, and route a network cable to the server. Obviously, I simplified the server deployment process, but the traditional approach is very time consuming, costly, and complex and not every developer would be able to do it. This is where cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure come into the picture, virtualizing that physical process into a simple process of clicking buttons on the Microsoft Azure website in order to build, create, and deploy a network to the web service server.
The following parameters explain why you would want to use the cloud platform to build your webhook in the cloud.
- Cost: Cloud platforms eliminate the need to buy physical hardware and software. Also, charges are based on usage, so if you do not use the server, you can simply turn it off and save money.
- Fast time to market: The server can be built and deployed by you in a minute, at the click of a button, and you simply focus on building an application.
- Scalable: Let's say that today you are targeting users in America, and tomorrow you need to target audiences in Asia. With cloud platforms, you can easily scale your web services globally.
- Performance: You never know—the voice application you build might do extremely well. For example, your voice application users might increase from 100 to 100,000 in a matter of days. With the increase in the amount of users using your voice application, the webhook must be able to support increases in usage. Cloud platforms allows you to quickly increase the performance of servers to accommodate demand.
- Easy to maintain: On a cloud platform, servers are easily maintained, allowing you to focus more on developing new features for your voice application. Also, because it is easy to maintain, maintenance costs will be low as well.
- Reliability: You would not want users to experience a critical error because your webhook went down. Cloud platforms bring highly available servers with redundancies and backups with a service level agreement of 99.9% to 99.99% uptime guarantees.
The following table details uptime percentages in terms of per year, per month, per week, and per day:
| Availability % |
Downtime per year |
Downtime per month |
Downtime per week |
Downtime per day |
| 99.9% | 8.76 hours | 43.8 minutes | 10.1 minutes | 1.44 minutes |
| 99.99% | 52.56 minutes | 4.38 minutes | 1.01 minutes | 8.64 seconds |