The Past, Present and Future of Cloud Computing
Dr Daniel Barreto, in the first lecture, introduced the class to the various up and coming buzz words that are being used in information technology and shaping our future. Out of the various trends in information technology like machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence, etc, I found the most interesting to be cloud computing. To say that cloud computing has entered and affected the realm of the IT world would be putting it mildly. Over the last few years we have seen cloud computing emerge radically and changed the way we consume, deploy and utilize computing technology within our digital lives. Ten years ago, Cloud Computing was different than today’s cloud. Cloud has evolved into an incubator for innovation, giving you the ability to test, adjust and deploy ideas that add value to the businesses across various industries.
Where it all Started
The University of California, Berkeley describes Cloud Computing “as providing the illusion of infinite computing resources to end users on demand while eliminating the upfront investment necessary to implement such services”. (https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/cloud-computing-past-present-future/74224).
The idea of an “intergalactic computer network” was introduced in the sixties by J.C.R. Licklider, who was responsible for enabling the development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1969. (http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/A-history-of-cloud-computing). One of the first milestones in cloud computing history was the arrival of Salesforce.com in 1999, which pioneered the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. The services firm paved the way for both specialist and mainstream software firms to deliver applications over the internet. Then Amazon started working with cloud computing technologies starting with Amazon web services and moving on to launch their EC2 Elastic compute cloud. Then came the big companies like google and apple who adopted cloud computing which was another major milestone in technology and since then the cloud has been growing and evolving at a rapid rate.
Present Day
While cloud computing as a technology has existed for some time now, the way businesses are using it has been rapidly changing. What started in many ways as simple hosting services, has progressed to Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service and more.
Today, large scale cloud computing has been democratized. It’s not limited to the big players anymore, but now is open to anyone, anywhere. It has become an established approach to the management and deployment of applications within a large and growing number of businesses. The reality is that most new software is developed using cloud as the central architectural tenant.
Into The Future
Explosion of information across industries as well as consumers is no longer a phenomenon that surprises us but the scale of it keeps getting bigger. Just to sample a few numbers 120 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute every day; more than 200 million emails are exchanged every minute; and a server has to be activated every 10 seconds to support new smartphones. In a recent presentation based on the report, titled State of the Cloud Computing 2015, from Bessemer Venture Partners’s Byron Deeter showed that the cloud computing market is growing at a 22.8% compound annual growth rate, and will reach $127.5 billion in 2018. (https://dazeinfo.com/2015/07/01/the-future-of-cloud-computing-127-billion-market-by-2018-report/). Cloud providers are getting access to customer usage data and are using that for improving their services and pricing. Vendors too need to make changes to their products, services and business models in order to stay relevant and grow their business. More open technologies are the order of the day.
In the end I would say that in the development of cloud computing the only certainty is that it is leading to an upheaval in the industry demanding changes from customers, services providers and traditional IT vendors. And the businesses who adapt to the rapidly changing cloud and tech, are the ones that will thrive.
References
https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/cloud-computing-past-present-future/74224
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/A-history-of-cloud-computing
https://dazeinfo.com/2015/07/01/the-future-of-cloud-computing-127-billion-market-by-2018-report/
http://www.servicetechmag.com/I83/0414-3
http://www.livemint.com/Industry/qtOwvo8xA5tJYXt1TemonI/Future-of-cloud-computing.html
One comment on “The Past, Present and Future of Cloud Computing”
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Hi Arohi!
Thanks for an interesting blog post. I’d like to add some nuance to the discussion surrounding cloud. I think it is important to make the distinction between centralized and decentralized cloud. Here I mean to distinghuish between centralized cloud providers such as AWS and models using P2P computing which can be considered a decentralized cloud solution, at least according to this IBM report https://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/internetofthings/. The report states that “as recent significant advances in peer-to-peer computing meet Moore’s Law, it will soon be possible to harness the compute power, terabytes of storage and bandwidth that will be on billions of devices, in millions of locations and sitting idle most of the time”.
The decentralized model/P2P computing is expected to play a significant role in the future of IoT
Additionally, I’d like to direct attention to NIST’s definition of cloud which I’ve found very useful in understanding the characteristics of cloud. The definition is visualized in this cube https://www.katescomment.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/CloudCube1.png
and described in detail here http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf