A brief history of cloud

Once upon a time, every company used to have their own servers hosting their applications.

People worked in shifts ensuring server and application uptime and had to run around data centre floors replacing failing parts.

Companies were required to have infrastructure management staff that ensured everything is running.

If you were just starting out as a company, co-location was the other option and that too came with high costs, maintenance challenges and scaling problems when your business really needed to grow rapidly.

The Virtualisation revolution

In the early noughties, VMWare launched their virtualisation products that allowed your infrastructure to be managed remotely, without physically being present in the data centre. Virtualisation technology was around for decades, but VMWare was first to successfully productise virtualisation.

You still needed the data centres, but now you had a layer of manageability on top. Infrastructure became a service.

Virtualisation enabled consolidation and better utilisation of existing hardware resources, reducing investment, wastage and the need for more cooling that was essential while running a large number of bare metal servers.

VMWare suite came with tooling that allowed spinning up and down of virtual compute, storage and networking resources, in rapid response to changing needs. Infrastructure could now be described in a text file and version controlled like application source code.

The ability to script and automate went hand in hand with the DevOps and Agile movements that needed a way to do things quickly and automatically in response to events.

The two roads to cloud

The late noughties saw two significant developments that created the cloud that we see today.

First was the genesis of AWS, who took the idea of infrastructure virtualisation to the next level by offering those capabilities from their managed data centres. All one needed was to sign up for an account, and you just login and spin up any kind of infrastructure you need.

There was no longer a need for:

• Managing data centres
• (Expensive) licensed hypervisors
• CapEx spend on hardware

This was perfect for startups too, all you had to bring was your own business idea and AWS provided the infrastructure. One could burst and scale easily in response to business events.

But there was still something missing as this was all about infrastructure centric world view of compute, storage and networking. The advent of Google App Engine and Heroku changed this by giving the developers a platform on which they could run their application code without worrying about underlying infrastructure.

Funny that neither AWS nor Google App Engine had the word ‘cloud’ in them, but that is exactly what they were — clouds.

Cloud had well and truly arrived by this point. It was no longer about startups only, enterprises could benefit just as much by being on it. The idea of regions made up of zones linked together by a backbone network made it easy for enterprises to deploy highly available, fault tolerant, DR ready solutions.

The age of Cloud Native

Cloud has also given us useful new technology solutions that are easy to build on cloud but difficult to implement in the on-prem datacentre.

Multi-data centre based solutions, Kubernetes clusters, CDN networks, pay per use Functions-as-service, elastic Kafka queues and GPU instances are all easy and cost effective to use on the cloud, but difficult and cost prohibitive to build on-prem.

This age of cloud has seen it evolve from being a nice-to-have convenience to an essential partner to everyones’ IT needs.