What is a Cloud Server?

A cloud server is a virtualized server running on infrastructure owned by a cloud service provider (CSP). Traditionally, organizations had to purchase and maintain their own physical servers to host applications and compute workloads. These servers would be located on-site or in nearby data centers.

Today, your organization can provision virtual cloud servers, where the underlying physical servers are maintained by third-party cloud providers. These virtual server instances, or cloud servers, are computing resources that provide the same performance, configuration options, and usability as physical servers. You can access virtually unlimited cloud servers in hundreds of different configuration types, including configurations that exist solely in the cloud, or connect with your existing on-premises infrastructure in a hybrid cloud configuration. You can run and host all types of applications and workloads in the cloud.

Cloud servers are a core component of cloud computing. Cloud servers remove the need for organizations to buy, run, and manage physical servers. You can use them exclusively or in combination with an existing server infrastructure in a hybrid cloud configuration. Launching servers in the cloud is straightforward and allows you to access highly configurable infrastructure.

Flexible options

You can provision almost any type of cloud server architecture without needing to understand the underlying hardware. This means you can choose cloud servers based on preferences such as graphics capabilities, machine-learning (ML) workloads, or networking functionality.

Maintaining compliance and meeting data sovereignty regulations is straightforward because you can also choose the geographic region in which the cloud server is located. You can choose the zone, or location, in the cloud computing environment.

Bare metal cloud servers allow you to reserve a full, dedicated hardware server in the cloud. This option works in certain situations requiring full isolation or resource control.

Cost-effective management

Investing in traditional physical servers was expensive and required significant long-term planning. Purchasing a physical server required a significant investment over many years. Now, you can rent a cloud server on demand at per-second billing. You can rent many cloud servers at any given time for different types of workloads, all without any billing lock-ins.

Cloud servers require no ongoing maintenance costs. The cloud provider handles the management of the underlying hardware and operating system layers, their configurations, and security updates. You only need to manage the operating system and software on your instance.

Because cloud servers are software-defined and independent of any one set of hardware, they don't degrade over time. This also eliminates any decommissioning costs you'd incur when you purchase and retire traditional servers.

Scalable provisioning

Cloud servers are highly scalable. If you run out of space or power on a server, you can set the server type or number of servers to increase automatically for larger workloads. You can also do the reverse and automatically downsize to accommodate smaller workloads.

Cloud servers include features to enable high availability. That includes features such as advanced load balancing and built-in failover mechanisms.

A cloud server provides scalability and flexibility for all modern applications. You can use cloud servers for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, microservices software architectures, analytics workloads, streaming applications, and many other types of workloads. Some specific examples include:

• Enterprise software, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources management systems (HRMS)
• Application hosting, such as mobile apps or document management apps
• Hosting high-resolution media, such as video streaming and games
• Scientific modeling applications
• High-traffic databases accessed remotely by multiple users
• Web applications and websites, through dedicated web servers running HTTP/HTTPS
• Machine learning (ML) workloads, for training ML models that need a large amount of compute power

Much of cloud computing, including cloud servers and other services offered by cloud service providers, is built on virtualization technology. Virtualization enables quick and scalable deployment of computing resources tailored to specific needs.

Virtualization

Virtualization is the process of creating and running a virtual, or software-only, instance of a hardware IT resource. Multiple virtual servers can run on the same physical machine, sharing its underlying computing resources. You can run different operating systems, workloads, and apps in these fully isolated virtual environments. You can run VMs on your own physical servers. However, cloud servers are VMs created and managed by a cloud provider on its infrastructure.

Provisioning

When you provision a cloud server, you allocate and configure computing resources within a cloud environment to deploy that instance. You provision cloud servers using the command line, graphical interfaces, or application programming interfaces (APIs). The APIs allow you to create, configure, delete, and manage your cloud servers remotely.

Typically, this process begins with you specifying the desired server capabilities:

• CPU
• Memory
• Storage
• Networking
• Operating system and any preinstalled software
• Other options

After you set these capabilities, automated tools in the cloud provision your cloud server, connect it to the appropriate resources, and configure its networking and data security settings. Often, cloud servers come preloaded with a Linux-based OS. However, most cloud servers can be configured to run any combination of operating system and software, or you can choose an appropriate instance type to fit your needs.

Scalability

Scaling physical server resources requires you to install more hardware components or whole servers manually. You scale up cloud servers by adjusting resource settings (number of vCPUs, memory) through an API or management console, or provision new instances.

Cost model

Organizations typically purchase physical servers as a capital expenditure (CapEx), where you invest upfront in hardware, rack space, power, cooling, and maintenance contracts, regardless of actual utilization rates. You typically purchase cloud server resources as an operational expenditure (OpEx) because the CSP bills you on a utility basis, such as per second or per hour.

We can classify cloud servers by their configuration and how they map to the cloud provider's infrastructure.

Configuration

Preconfigured cloud servers are available for different use cases. You can also customize your own cloud server from scratch.

General purpose

These instances offer a balanced ratio of CPU, memory, and storage. This makes them suitable for a wide range of applications, including web servers and small- to medium-sized databases.

Compute-optimized

These instances are designed for CPU-intensive workloads. They provide a high ratio of CPU cores to memory. These instances are ideal for compute-bound applications such as batch processing and scientific modeling.

Memory-optimized

These instances offer a high amount of RAM relative to the number of CPU cores. They're suitable for applications that process large datasets in near-real time, such as in-memory databases and big data analytics platforms.

Accelerated computing

Accelerated computing instances are equipped with hardware accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). They're optimized for specialized tasks such as ML, graphics rendering, and scientific simulation.

Storage-optimized

These instances offer high disk throughput and are optimized for workloads that need high-speed access to large volumes of data, such as big data analytics and data warehousing.

High-performance computing

High-performance computing (HPC) instances are customized for computationally intensive workloads that need high network performance and low latency. They're well-suited for tasks such as fluid dynamics simulations, seismic analyses, and other scientific computations.

Hosting type

You can also classify cloud servers by their hosting type.

Read about cloud hosting »

Shared hosting

In a shared hosting environment, multiple cloud servers share the resources of a single underlying physical cloud server. High workloads on one cloud server can impact the performance of others. However, although the underlying resources are shared, your instances remain separate.

Virtual private server hosting

A virtual private server (VPS) is a cloud server that runs on the same physical infrastructure as other cloud servers. However, it's allocated its own, dedicated portion of the server's resources, which it will not share with other tenants. High workloads on other servers are designed not to impact your VPS performance.

Read about VPS »

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting provides an entire, physical server in the cloud to a single organization. The organization can configure the physical machine as a single cloud server or multiple servers to fully control the environment in which their workloads run.

Hybrid environments

A hybrid cloud environment connects public cloud servers with private servers via networking and an orchestration layer—a software service that manages communication between these systems. This cloud computing model allows you to run variable workloads on different servers depending on the use case. For example, you keep sensitive customer data on a private cloud server while using public cloud instances for your ecommerce storefront to handle temporary spikes in web traffic.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud server solutions for organizations of all sizes. You can choose the best cloud server option depending on your use case, configuration, and customization requirements.

Some of our services offer preconfigured cloud servers, which are ideal for users who want to focus on a specific task, such as application development, without backend management. Other cloud computing services offer you complete control over every aspect of your server environment, from hardware configuration to operating system.

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a compute platform with over 1,000 instance types, enabling granular configuration of processors, data storage, networking, and operating systems. It offers Intel, AMD, and ARM architectures. You can create specialized instances designed to optimize price-performance for machine learning training and inference workloads.
• Amazon Lightsail offers easy-to-use virtual private server (VPS) instances, containers, storage, databases, and more at a cost-effective monthly price.
• AWS Amplify is ideal for developing, deploying, and hosting single-page web apps or static sites with a serverless backend.

Get started with cloud servers on AWS by creating a free account today.