Cloud computing over the years

Back in the mid to late 2000s when Amazon Web Services came out with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it wasn’t much more than a virtual machine hosting service with a self-service interface. Since then the cloud has come a long way and in this post, I shall try to trace the journey to its present day avatar.

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.

— Nicholas Klein, US trade union address, 1918

At first, most enterprises simply ignored this latent phenomenon. Small and medium businesses saw it as experimental technology at best, while start-ups embraced the OpEx model with glee. Those companies that did setup infrastructure on the cloud saw it as nothing more than another data-center with an incredibly simple & fast turn-around sans SLAs. Though true at the time, unfortunately this view persisted long after the cloud had matured into its own.

The next stage of the cloud’s evolution was largely categorized by extensive customer education, low risk lift-and-shift migrations of simple workloads and the move to SaaS (Salesforce, GMail for Business, etc.).

The third stage brought focus onto elastic, pay-as-you-go services towards higher reliability, high-availability, scalability, performance and good customer support. Integration of tools became key for service providers. More users understood the architectural paradigm shift recognizing the underlying fabric of the cloud to be disposable hardware. Warner Vogels’ (CTO, Amazon) famous words “Everything fails all the time” further catalyzed the mantra of ‘designing for failure’. API based access for controlling systems and resources had made this possible. This was the coming of age of the cloud leading to truly transformational ways of architecting and deploying software. Today, most cloud proponents take much of this for granted.

And so, we are at this new juncture in the cloud journey today where conversations have moved to several enterprise concerns. The shift in focus towards the enterprise was more than evident at the AWS RE:Invent conference last November. AWS even had the Dow Jones CTO at the keynote. The battleground has changed and everyone from Google to Rackspace to relatively newer players have been gearing up with new approaches. Software defined networking (SDN) & Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) have become important. Things like governance, compliance, privacy, data liability and risk management on the cloud have gained more focus than ever before.

So what’s next? Here are few things I see on the near to mid-term horizon:

• Multi-provider compatible architectures.
• Multi-region deployments.
• The re-emergence of PaaS. With a stronger eco-system of services.
• Hybrid cloud management across VPN-VPC.
• Deployment automation. Ops via code, not via humans.