Launching an IT startup in 10 minutes
What the energy factories of the 19th century have in common with the digital cloud
When I was a student in computer science, there was a generational divide of sorts between our professors who had grown up using punched cards as the primary way to enter programs into computers, versus us students who started using keyboards and for whom punched cards were dying out.
More recently, when I was talking to a student about computers, I realised there is a similar divide now between those professors who have actually seen a physical server at some point, and students for whom a server is some virtual, fungible cloud that they access via their laptop.
So what is this cloud? And why are we hearing so much about it these days? As told in Nicholas Carr’s book “The Big Switch”, one way to explain it is via a detour to the late 19th century, when the industrial revolution had largely occurred. At that time, it was normal for factories to generate their own energy for production, harnessing coal with steam engines, or hydraulic energy with mills. Power generation was a crucial and indispensable part of any factory. Then, came along electric distribution and the first electric utility (created by Thomas Edison), and in a few decades, it became possible to just hook up factories to the electric grid, and receive current on demand, without having to worry about generating it oneself.
Cloud computing is a similar phenomenon, but concerning information technology rather than electricity. In fact, cloud providers run huge data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers, and businesses rent some of the servers remotely on demand. So instead of having to run their own data centers at their places in order to host applications like email, web sites, and data science, companies nowadays use those of the cloud providers.
The key enabler that has made this revolution possible is of course the internet and the web. Just like you needed a distribution infrastructure to get electricity from a utility, you need a network to be able to access applications that are running somewhere else. And so it is no coincidence that cloud computing emerged just after the internet had become ubiquitous.
Of course, while that was the starting point, today there is much more to the cloud than just running email on someone else’s servers. Cloud providers are continually expanding their offerings, adding services such as databases, machine learning, and storage, that are all used as building blocks for applications you use on your phone like music streaming like Spotify, maps or games. As a consequence this also levelled the field for startups building information technology related services. Just 10–15 years ago, to get started doing anything in the information technology business, a startup needed to cough up large amounts just to buy and operate servers. Now, already with 100 Swiss Francs, you can get a world-class infrastructure up and running in minutes. Good news for the entrepreneurs in our country!
