TL; DR
- The software sector, a major driving force for the information era, always works to remove the tedious in people’s thinking.
- What will the next information revolution bring? Let’s start our journey with “cloud computing”.
- There’s no doubt that Cloud Native will be a powerful spur for the IT industry. But is it perfect?
When a software was initially invented, it may carry the hope of taking the drudgery out of people’s minds, just as Charles Babbage has expressed.
Charles Babbage was a mathematician, astronomer, and inventor in the 19th century. Back then, data tabulation often consumed much time and energy for repeated proofreading. Accuracy, however, was far from satisfying, whereas errors could wreak havoc. For example, for key parts in nautical charts, even minor mistakes may incur casualties.
Human errors are impossible to eliminate, which Babbage also realized. But how to solve this problem? He proposed replacement of human work with machine operation, where machines will compute the most complicated and error-prone parts. In the same period, the steam engine, invented during the First Industrial Revolution, made much of the impossible possible. Inspired by that, Babbage reached out for “calculation by steam”. Gradually, he designed the Difference Engine, and then the Analytical Engine. The Difference Engine is able to mechanize a series of calculations, while the Analytical Engine very much resembles its modern counterparts. The latter, fully program-controlled, cannot think, but can only carry out “what people instructed it to do” which really amounted to what we today call computer programming.
Unfortunately, a lack of funds eventually stunted the materialization of both engines. Nonetheless, the concept put forward by Babbage greatly fast-forwarded the pace of computing progress. In 1951, the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) Machine, designed and supervised by John von Neumann, met the world. The fact that the IAS Machine was hundreds of times faster than the first ever electronic computer ENIAC, not only proved von Neumann to be correct, but also underlined the role of the von Neumann Architecture as the cornerstone of the contemporary information society.
Self-evolution
Every leap forward in the IT industry comes with the evolution of human society. At the turn of the 19th century, the invention of the telegraph and the radio ushered in the Third Industrial Revolution, that is, the IT revolution era. With the aid of computers, mobile phones, and the Internet, the IT sector has witnessed rapid progress. Since the arrival of the IAS Machine, human society, however, seems to be trapped in Web 2.0 of IT revolution, despite constant innovation in big data, cloud computing, IoT, and AI.
How far away are we from the next IT revolution or Web 3.0? Some people say the situation now is more or less the same as that of the Third Revolution. At that time, those fast-evolving technologies mostly remained on paper or were going through tests. Lack of effective practices, as well as confidence from researchers themselves, had stalled the arrival of the next era right on the spot.
History tells us that a new chapter always calls for multiple essential factors. Where is the IT era heading? To figure this out, we have to start with trending technologies, among which cloud computing is a very good example. Let’s find this out together.
Future of Cloud Computing
Conventional applications begin to show increasing complexities, as users crave more capacity, stronger computing, as well as enhanced stability and security. To satisfy their clients, companies tend to purchase a load of hardware and software and recruit a professional team of O&M personnel, all of which are money consuming. Expenses surge as quantity and scale enlarge. That being said, as large businesses grumble over shortage, small-sized ones are worn down by heavy O&M costs. Such that, could computing comes to the stage as this hard time requires.
Cloud computing refers to the on-demand delivery of services through the Internet. These resources include infrastructure (hardware/server), storage, database, and applications. It permits large-scale operation, distribution, virtualization, high availability and scalability, and on-demand services. Cloud builds redundancy in the system, as a cost-effective way to ensure that any individual system failure has a fallback within the architecture. Also, it saves the trouble caused by the distance between physical servers, in times of local downtime or disaster. That’s where Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), a cloud-based solution widely offered by large cloud providers, steps in to ensure continued operations.
What is Cloud Native? To understand this concept, let’s first talk about containers. As economic globalization advances at a fast speed, containers show up as a major means of transportation, bringing about sweeping changes to goods packaging, freight, and delivery. The concept of this one of the greatest miracles in human history was generated at the request of standardization and systematization.
Rather than container for physical goods, cloud native stores binary code and software. Nowadays, as virtualization technology thrives, distributed framework is also gaining popularity. Driven by open-source communities such as container technology, sustainable delivery, and orchestration system, cloud computing applications have become an irreversible trend, underpinned by development concepts such as microservices. Besides, large enterprises and organizations also prefer extensive application of emerging cloud-native technologies, with an ambition to achieve their digital transformation. In 2019, Gartner released a report announcing the arrival of the cloud-native era, where 75% of global enterprises will set foot in containerized applications within the coming three years. Cloud revenue by global enterprises is set to reach $474 billion in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 16%.
Plagued by the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for cloud services has sharply ramped up, as people are restricted at home for online entertainment and online work assignments. Going forward, big data, blockchain, and AI, propped up by cloud services, are predestined to grow big. One thing worth mentioning is that cloud security has always been a big concern for cloud service (esp. public cloud) users. Despite repeated attempts and efforts, McAfee’s research indicates that only 52% of organizations experience better security in the cloud than on-premises IT environments. Cloud native may show promising prospects. But how to unleash its full potential still requires serious deliberation.
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Please stay tuned for the next post: General’s letter 👀
