Just a few short years ago launching a virtual machine in the cloud was a simple and basic. With a couple of API calls and maybe a button click or two you were up and running in a just a few minutes. The choices were limited but it was nice. You could even get a little storage to go along with the instance. Just before that we were leasing, renting and co-locating dedicated physical hardware in data centers and it took weeks to order, provision, deploy, and set up the gear. Fast forward to today and we are now full-on in a cloud computing revolution redefining how technology is deployed. There are so many choices and so many of them good that it can be complete overwhelming to those trying to make sense of it all. On top of it all, every day I meet people who have never deployed anything in “the cloud.” It’s just as easy as ever to launch a machine but there is so much more available to the on-demand computing as a service would be client today. I was trying to think of what really is different or better today than it was five years ago. What’s really new to show for 5+ years of cloud computing innovation and effort?
First and foremost, people figured out that cloud computing is good for something really important (meaning people not Google). They figured out that the cloud in its various forms is phenomenal for capturing and processing what has come to be known as big data. This is a really important point. It’s never been easy, and still isn’t, to aggregate and process voluminous, high speed, or wildly unstructured data. In fact, prior to cloud computing coming of age it was down right impossible fiscally and technically. Now, it’s all there at the click of a few buttons as pretty as you like. You can now spin up a super computer for just a few dollars an hour to crunch even your most gnarly data sets.
A second fairly dramatic improvement is in the category of orchestration of resources. There are far more resources available to orchestrate for an infinite number of purposes but doing so has never been easier (not, I did not say easy). Due to the proliferation in understanding of the creation and consumption of API’s you can now quite literally with a single set of tools launch a server at several different cloud providers, geo locations, and even operating system varieties if so you wanted and if you’re clever with tools like Puppet, Chef, Cloud Formation, Cloud Foundry or others you can do it all from the comfort of your very own laptop in just a few minutes. You can quickly and relatively easily, historically speaking, compose masses of servers into useful services for nearly anything you can dream!
A third thing that’s changed is the raw power available via a command line or cloud console and in the newer implementations of older software architectures. You can now, in just a few moments, provision a server with 244 GiB memory and high speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet. And, that is just a building block to the real power. The real power comes as a result of massive improvements and capabilities in the arena of distributed computation, storage, and software defined networking. This allows you to provision dozens to thousands of these types of machines relatively on a whim. Frankly, not many people can even figure out what to do with all this power even if they do know how to provision it today. This has forced software architects and engineers to push forward much faster with zeal and learn how to write distributed applications and in many cases, the occasion is being met. So, raw power in both virtualized hardware and the software that can be deployed on it has come a very long way.
In summary, cloud computing had already been brewing for decades with its roots reaching far back in time. Grids, clusters and more were all precursors. However, it is striking how far things have come in just about five years. There has been unprecedented improvement and what feels like ever increasing speed of improvements. Good times indeed.