From the Stone Age to the Cloud Era: Building Websites with Cloud Studio

In the early days of web development, building a site required renting a physical server from a small data center, paying for both the hardware and the operation services (IP binding, DNS resolution, and occasional manual restarts). This "stone‑age" approach was costly and cumbersome.

With the rise of cloud computing, the scale effect has dramatically lowered server costs. Cloud services such as virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions allow resources to be used at a much finer granularity. As a result, building and deploying a website has become far richer and simpler.

Cloud Studio is a browser‑based integrated development environment (IDE) that provides a persistent, never‑install workspace. Users can open the IDE from any browser and develop as if they were on a local machine.

Typical deployment scenarios illustrated in the article:

Buy a cloud VM and deploy the site manually.

Use object storage (COS) to host a static site with pay‑as‑you‑go pricing.

Deploy directly on a cloud function (serverless).

Cloud Studio offers a one‑click cloud deployment kit. After logging in via QR code, users can click “Start Deployment” and the kit automatically detects an index.html file, publishes the static files through Tencent Cloud API Gateway and Cloud Functions, and generates a random domain name.

For custom domains, a deploy.yml configuration file can be added. Example snippet:

cloud:
  apiGateway:
    customDomain:
      name: www.yourDomain.com
      certificateId: sJGuMdr9          # HTTPS certificate ID
      isDefaultMapping: false

The deployment kit also supports mainstream front‑end frameworks (Next.js, Vue, React, etc.). By selecting a framework template (e.g., Next.js), Cloud Studio creates a workspace, builds the project, and deploys it with a single click, without any additional configuration.

Beyond deployment, Cloud Studio provides features such as custom templates, collaborative editing, and integration with other Tencent Cloud services (API Gateway, Cloud Functions, COS, databases, etc.).

The article concludes that cloud computing has transformed software production from the “stone age” to a “steam‑engine era”, and Cloud Studio further shortens the gap between development and delivery.