Servers: As I understand them

What are servers?

Servers are like screen-less computers that can perform computations and have storage (disk space).

When do we need servers?

Servers need to be online almost all the time to cater to the incoming requests of users.

Where does servers come in?

We live in a world of client-server architecture — a client requests for some data and the server obliges. All websites/ mobile applications function in this model.

Whether we open PhonePe or “https://www.google.com” on our devices, we are essentially making a request (as a client) to the PhonePe and Google servers to send us the respective webpages/screen.

Can we run a server on our own?

Yes, of course. Each of our devices can act as a server if we can write and run codes/ programs that can process an input and return data.

But how will they discover our server/device?

That’s where hosting comes into the picture. We need some endpoint / addresses that can be shared with common folks so that they can send us requests.

Suppose you do all that, but a major issue with us keeping the servers is that it needs to be connected to power and internet all the time to satisfy users.

This is where cloud services come into the picture. Services like AWS/Azure cloud provide us online servers when we can deploy our code and the server will be always “listening” to incoming requests.