Cloud |7/17/2023-9 min read

Cloud Computing

A brief history of Cloud Computing and what's next.

Learning history is something essential for many reasons. It teaches us where we came from. It gives us the context of why things are the way they are. It is a way to expand our minds and help us with our thoughts and ideas.

Think before you speak. Read before you think. Fran Lebowitz

I am starting a journey of learning and improving my knowledge of Cloud Computing. Let’s go back to the beginning...

Origins

The internet was created in the 1960s, with the goal to create a network to connect 2 points through multiple paths. Imagine a cable connecting points A and B; if you cut the cable, the connection will break. But if you have multiple cables connecting point A and B, even by cutting one, other paths still remain.

Why is this concept important? In the example of a war or being under attack, communication between troops and command line could be lost, leaving them blind and add a disadvantage coordinate a proper offensive.

This was during the height of the Cold War. The U.S. military was interested in creating computer networks that could continue to function after having portions removed, such as in the case of a nuclear strike. Tech Target

As a result of that fear and goal to build a resilient communication system, a working network appeared during the 60. It was called ARPANET.

The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network. History

Once you can exchange information between multiple computers, other applications can appear. What if different people could connect to that computer at the same time? Then you could share the available resources on that machine between multiple users.

In 1963, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) presented MIT with $2 million for Project MAC. The funding included a requirement for MIT to develop technology allowing for a “computer to be used by two or more people, simultaneously.” Data Diversity

Those “shared” computers are normal ones, similar to the personal computers you can have at home but have a different setup. In the left pic, you can see that the components are built in a rack, and you can pile them on a shelve (central pic). The result is a tower quickly holding 20 computers (right pic). The room where you store multiple racks is a data center.

Networks

In the following picture, from left to right, we can see huge submarine cables (we need a way to connect the different data centers around the world):

Nowadays, we have many of them connection different places around the world:

As you can imagine, since the 60s, we’ve been extremely busy founding different companies and industries to build better computers and data centers and deploy the cable infrastructure to connect them.

By the end of the 80s and early 90s, we managed to create multiple networks. Each network was composed of multiple data centers or locations owned by organizations (on-premises). A university with racks on campus wanted to share papers and information with another. The army had different bases and wanted to share information and computational power.

At the same time, another revolution was happening. Since the 70s, different groups of people and companies like Apple or Microsoft worked hard to make computers affordable for companies and individuals, and the idea of leveraging those networks to exchange information between more people started to grow.

The Web

Many things, especially in the 90s, completely changed our communication. The creation of the first website was one of them:

Berners-Lee published the first web site, which described the project itself, on 20 December 1990; it was available to the Internet from the CERN network. The site provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get started with your own website. Wikipedia

Other web browsers appear, like Moisac or later Netscape (born from Moisaic’s team). This new trend, combined with affordable personal computers, made people interact in new ways. Countries, companies, and different kinds of organizations soon rethought their way of working and interacting.

Companies built data centers by the late 90s and early 2000s to increase their computational power and storage space. But sometimes, they decided to outsource those tasks to external companies, renting the computers from existing data centers. Soon, software companies started to offer solutions to manage and secure that infrastructure.

This environment and the fast speed of moving operations to data centers forced us to create more innovative business methods.

What is the Cloud?

GPT4

What is the Cloud?

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This kind of computing allows businesses to save resources because they do not have to invest in their own hardware or software infrastructure; instead, they can access these resources over the internet from a cloud service provider.

It is hard to identify the origin of the word cloud in the context of data center and infrastructure provisioning, but in this excerpt from one of Ben Horowitz's books, we can see a potential one (1999):

The term cloud had been used previously in the telecommunications industry to describe the smart cloud that handled all the complexity routing, billing, and the like, so that one could plug a dumb device into the smart cloud and get all the smart functionality for free. We thought the same concept was needed in computing, so that software developers wouldn’t have to worry about security, scaling, and disaster recovery. And if you are going to build a cloud, it should be big and loud, and that’s how Loudcloud was born. Interestingly, the most lasting remnant of Loudcloud is the name itself, as the word cloud hadn’t been previously used to describe a computing platform. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

Models

There are different ways of approaching your cloud strategy. Let’s take a look at the following diagram:

• On-Premises: you own the data center and the computers
• Cloud: you rent the computers from a cloud provider
• Hybrid Cloud: you have a mix of both
• Multi Cloud: you use multiple cloud providers

Some key points

Cloud providers:

• Own data centers and offer access to their computers on demand
• Simplified access to those computers running software to manage the infrastructure
• Manage security and maintain the data centers and computers with regular updates
• Deal with real estate, government regulations, and environmental impact

These providers offer:

• Cost Efficiency: reduce capital expenses on deploying and managing infrastructure
• On-demand capacity: scaling up and down the infrastructure consumption is possible. For example, in the holiday season or Black Friday, you don’t need to allocate more hardware; just pay a higher bill
• Global Scale: providers have data centers around the world, so you can be close to your customers or complain about countries' regulations regarding information

The Rise of Cloud Computing

As we have seen in the previous section, in technology, there is not easy to identify clear points where something was invented or started because many companies and research laboratories are trying to solve similar problems simultaneously across the world.

During an Amazon executive retreat in 2003, something important happened:

It was there that the executive team conducted an exercise identifying the company’s core competencies — an exercise they expected to last 30 minutes, but ended up going on a fair bit longer.... As the team worked, Jassy recalled, they realized they had also become quite good at running infrastructure services like compute, storage and database (due to those previously articulated internal requirements). What’s more, they had become highly skilled at running reliable, scalable, cost-effective data centers out of need. As a low-margin business like Amazon, they had to be as lean and efficient as possible. TechCrunch

And from there, you can see...

In the previous timeline, I’ve only included USA and China companies because they are probably the countries with more investment and innovation in this industry.

I’ve tried to identify significant players. They’re not necessarily the only ones. I might miss some important ones. The goal of the timeline and table was to illustrate that since 2006, many companies have been created worldwide.

What’s next?

But what's next with our current situation and so many players in this market? Can this trend somehow increase? Are cloud companies dead? I want to explore three new industries:

• Hardware: Quantum
• Infrastructure: Satellites
• Software: Artificial Intelligence

Let’s learn a bit more about them:

Quantum

Many companies and governments worldwide are heavily investing in the development of Quantum Computing. It is still being determined how far we are to have valuable computers that we can rely on and integrate into our workflows.

A more established ecosystem attracted record investment, but the pace of start-up creation slowed Mckinsey

Britain aims to get quantum computing ‘by 2030’ with record investment. Telegraph

Some Cloud providers are offering simulators and even access to real machines worldwide. And this is very exciting because we are again facing the need for standardization in terms of programming languages, APIs, or even how they work. A lot of innovation and discovery needs to be done in this field.

Amazon Braket: Accelerate quantum computing research. AWS

Bringing useful quantum computing to the world. IBM

Satellites

Providing internet by Satellites is something that has been introduced previously. We’ve been doing this for decades, but Starlink (SpaceX) has changed the way we perceive the internet by satellite forever.

In recent years, Starlink has played an important role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia tried to cut the cables and leave Ukranine blind, Starlink has provided a connection making it possible for the Ukrainian army to operate.

This is an excellent example of how the military and defense are again pushing us to a new generation of connectivity. And I’m sure that the long-term benefits we will experience will be fascinating. Like having good internet connection in planes, ships, rural areas, and of course, making the internet accessible in many places without infrastructure.

In the long run, this battle that we are living in now between companies like Starlink, Amazon: Project Kuiper, OneWeb, Telesat, Viasat, and even the European Union will open many opportunities.

Artificial Intelligence

In the last ten years, AI has increased, and many companies are using it to improve user experience, increase engagement, and send ads more personalized and accurately.

But there are many other usages, like self-driving vehicles and generative AI applied in different fields like images, videos, and coding. We will see many more products like virtual assistants, the creation of AGI, or an even better understanding of the universe.

Conclusion

In the future, Cloud providers will be backed by Quantum Computers. They will offer affordable and easy-to-use AI tools that companies could integrate into their products. Finally, more people will be connected to the Internet through satellites, with more users connecting to remote servers in data centers worldwide.

The Cloud industry is here to stay, and not only that, it will increase significantly in the upcoming years. Understanding more about it, embracing its capabilities, and trying to integrate it into our apps and business is crucial to survive in these uncertain times.