A developer cloud is a cloud provider for start-ups, developers and mid-sized companies. It rents out virtual servers, storage, managed databases, Kubernetes and GPU servers, billed by the hour, through a short menu with simple prices. It is a kind of infrastructure as a service (IaaS): renting computing power instead of buying servers. The page on cloud computing explains the general idea.
Why not use the biggest clouds? The hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, offer hundreds of services. Each service has its own settings and its own way of charging. A team of three may need only a server, a database and some storage. A developer cloud offers those few things, with a fixed monthly price for each size of server. So the team knows its bill in advance.
The basic product is the virtual private server (VPS). It is a virtual machine: software splits one physical server into many smaller ones, and each one behaves like a computer of its own, with its own operating system. The operating system is the base software, such as Linux, that runs the computer and every program on it.
Consider a three-person company in Bhopal that runs a quiz app for students preparing for government exams. One developer opens the provider's website, called the control panel or console. She clicks Create. She chooses the provider's data centre in Bengaluru, chooses Ubuntu Linux, and chooses a size: 2 processor cores, 4 GB of memory and an 80 GB disk. About a minute later, the server is running, and she receives its numeric internet address. She logs in from her laptop and installs the app. The price is about ₹3 an hour, and the bill stops at a monthly cap of roughly ₹2,000.
Next, she adds a managed database. The provider installs the database, applies its updates and takes a backup every day. So nobody in the team has to do this work at night.
In the week before a big exam, ten times as many students use the app. The team runs the app in containers on the provider's Kubernetes service. A container is a package of the app's code with everything it needs to run. Kubernetes starts more copies of the containers, on more servers, when the load rises, and removes them afterwards. The team pays for the extra servers only for those days. The page on containers and Kubernetes explains how this works.
Developer clouds now rent out GPU servers too. A GPU is a chip that does thousands of calculations at the same time, which is what training and running AI models needs. A team rents one by the hour, instead of buying it for lakhs of rupees.
The developer cloud is one piece of the app's setup. The team's web address is pointed at its server through DNS. Images and pages are copied to servers in cities near the users by a content delivery network. And as the company grows, it may add more providers and accounts, which a cloud management platform keeps track of.