How cloud has become "the fabric of our lives"

Day 2 kicked off with an awesome keynote by John Engates – CTO of Rackspace Hosting titled “Rackspace-An Open Cloud Discussion.” John started off with the perspective that cloud has become the new hub for all of our consumer devices.

Think about the fact that many businesses would not exist today w/o cloud and what cloud architectures enabled: low cost servers enabling lower cost infrastructure has given rise to our favorite companies in:

Social Media & Location services
Collaboration & Communication
Video Streaming
Internet of Things (everything connected) – thermostats, appliances, cameras, cars!

Stealing a bit of cotton’s tagline, cloud is becoming “the fabric of our lives – embedded in our everyday life – it is enabling the human computer interface.” Whether it’s social media, video streaming, collaboration, or embedded into everything from tractors to appliances to cars, cloud is creating a mountain of data.

And, it’s all driven by a constant mobile connection to cloud. Tablets and smartphones are the ultimate cloud devices. The iPhone, Android phones, tablets would not exist without cloud. Everything is serving to create an entirely new ecosystem of software providers delivering their applications via the cloud. No better example than Salesforce.com and what they have accomplished in terms of delivering software via the cloud and collecting mountains of data from users, for users.

At the heart of all of this is the data center, and “the world is speeding up.” Everyday something new comes out. A new app, and new device all feeding this massive network we call the internet. Every 5.32 years the internet doubles in size! By 2020 50 Billion devices will be connected to the internet.

For example, today is election day in the US, think about where we were just 4 years ago on Facebook and Twitter. In 2008 on election night there were 44 million US users over 18 (voting age) on Facebook. Today, there are 143 million. On Twitter, there were 3.4 million US voting age users. Today, there are 24 million.

These are just microcosms of the growth of cloud in terms of it being the fabric of our lives. Think about how you used the internet, what devices you owned, how much storage you consumed just 4 years ago…and compare that to today.

Has cloud become a fabric within your life?