When I got the news that I'd been selected for a cloud engineering boot camp here in Lagos, two things happened simultaneously: I was excited, and immediately convinced I had no business being there.
You see, I come from a different corner of tech. I'm a Salesforce Consultant with certifications in Administration and CPQ. I train AI models on platforms like Appen and Remotasks. I do data analysis in Excel and Power BI. These are not nothing but infrastructure? The cloud? That felt like someone else's territory.
A few sessions in, I'm realising that everything I've already done sits on top of exactly what we're now learning to build. That reframe matters. This article is my attempt to lay out the foundational shift clearly, for myself as much as anyone reading this.
The era of physical data centres
Not too long ago, if a company wanted to run software, it had to own the machines that ran it. That meant buying servers, racking them in a dedicated room or an entire building, hiring engineers to maintain them, and hoping nothing failed at the wrong moment. This was Traditional IT, and for decades, it was simply the cost of doing business with technology.
The model had a certain logic to it. You owned your hardware, so you controlled your environment. But control came with a heavy price: capital expenditure was enormous, scaling up took months of procurement and installation, and scaling down was basically impossible. You couldn't un-buy a server. Resources sat idle during quiet periods and buckled under sudden demand spikes.
Think about what this meant for businesses in a market like Nigeria, where infrastructure investment is already a significant barrier. Building and maintaining your own data centre was not just expensive; for most organisations, it was simply not viable. Tech had a ceiling, and the ceiling was physical.
"We need more capacity" used to mean: raise a purchase order, wait weeks for delivery, find a rack, configure the machine. By then, the moment had often passed.
Enter the cloud: computing as a utility
Cloud computing flips that model entirely. Instead of owning hardware, you rent capacity from a provider (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) over the internet, paying only for what you actually use. Need a server for one hour? Pay for one hour. Need a thousand servers for a product launch weekend? Spin them up, use them, shut them down.
The NIST definition describes it as the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Practically speaking, infrastructure became a service, not an asset.
There are three service models worth knowing. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) gives you raw virtual machines and storage. PaaS (Platform as a Service) adds a managed layer so you can focus on code, not servers. SaaS (Software as a Service) delivers finished applications entirely managed by the provider, which, as a Salesforce Consultant, is actually the layer I've been living in for years without fully realising it.
Why businesses, especially in Nigeria, are making the move
A concrete competitive advantage drives the migration from on-premise to cloud, and the case is even sharper in markets like Nigeria, where the cost and unreliability of physical infrastructure have historically held businesses back.
Speed of innovation. In the old model, launching a new product required procuring infrastructure first. In the cloud, a developer can provision a fully configured environment in minutes. The feedback loop between idea and production shrinks from months to days, which is critical for Lagos-based startups competing at global speed.
Elasticity. Cloud resources scale with demand. A fintech startup that gets featured on a major platform doesn't need to have anticipated that traffic spike six months in advance. The infrastructure grows and shrinks with the workload.
Cost efficiency. Capital expenditure shifts to operational expenditure. Organisations stop paying for idle capacity. For businesses operating with leaner budgets, this is genuinely transformational.
Global reach. Deploying infrastructure closer to your users used to require owning hardware in multiple countries. Now it is a configuration choice. Nigerian companies can serve international customers without international offices.
Reliability. Major cloud platforms offer 99.9%+ uptime SLAs with built-in redundancy. That kind of resilience, built from scratch on owned hardware, would be prohibitively expensive for most organisations.
The DevOps connection: where my background suddenly makes sense
Here's what clicked for me during the first session: the cloud doesn't just change where computing happens; it changes how teams work. And that's the DevOps conversation.
DevOps breaks down the wall between software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), with the goal of building, testing, and releasing software faster and more reliably. Traditionally, developers wrote code and handed it to operations teams to deploy, a slow, manual, often broken process.
The cloud makes DevOps natural. When infrastructure can be defined as code, provisioned through an API, and torn down after a test, automation becomes the default. CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy code automatically run on cloud infrastructure. This is what makes continuous delivery real rather than theoretical.
And here's the part I keep thinking about: every tool I've already worked with (Salesforce, Power BI, the AI annotation platforms) runs on this infrastructure. The cloud isn't something separate from what I've been doing. It's the foundation underneath it. Learning to work at that layer doesn't make my previous experience irrelevant; it makes it legible in a new way.
The cloud is not the destination. It's the infrastructure that makes the destination, fast, automated, collaborative software delivery, actually reachable.
The shift is still happening, and so am I
Traditional IT isn't dead. Many enterprises still run workloads on-premise, and hybrid architectures are common. But the direction is clear. Cloud computing has become the dominant model for modern software infrastructure, and the Lagos tech ecosystem, from fintech to healthtech to the growing DevOps talent base, is building directly on top of it.
The imposter syndrome hasn't fully left. But it's quieter now that I understand what I'm actually learning and why it connects to everything I've already done. I'm not starting from zero. I'm going deeper.
Six months from now, I'll have a lot more to say about this. For now, this is where I'm starting.
