Finally, a simple chronology of cloud that explains it’s humble beginnings and where it may be heading… Search Cloud Computing put together a nice graphic that looks at cloud through the years.
The dot com bubble proved that simply having a dot com at the end of your company name proved nothing in terms of business viability. I remember those days when dot com start-ups were the beneficiaries of a flood of venture capital funding and as a result over built their infrastructure and over committed to “what success looks like” promises. It may be one of the most compelling examples of over-provisioning we have seen in the last couple decades, but it also launched a business model where for how to take over-provisioned hardware and turn it into a service.
Amazon launching AWS in 2006 gave birth to cloud and it became the single most overused buzzword in the industry, and arguably still is. Towards the end of the decade clouds were popping up everywhere delivered by household names like Google, and traditional enterprise IT took notice. They weren’t about to shift nor share their compute, storage, and networking architecture, so they did what they always do…built their own. Public clouds and private clouds were popping up everywhere, but they tended to embrace the same silo’d infrastructure the enterprise has been trying to avoid for years. We needed a way of opening up the infrastructure to be able to talk between clouds, to enable businesses large and small to look and act like an Amazon or a Google, and open source software was the answer.
Those dot com like companies at the end of the 1990s finally had a solution that made economic sense. They didn’t have to buy and run their own infrastructure, they could leverage someone else’s to deliver their services. And enterprise traditionalists, they didn’t have to flip a switch and move everything to the public cloud. They could leverage the cloud for pieces of their IT – primarily storage – and we have hybrid cloud. Many argue that hybrid cloud is the future, and I tend to agree. There are companies that will operate their entire business in the cloud, but there are more enterprises that will not. There is just too much investment and reliance on existing in-house mission critical architecture (compute, network, storage) for them to make any drastic moves. It will take time, further innovation, and proof, so like anything large and established, they will move slow, and pivot pieces here and there on their journey to cloud.
At the end of the day, it’s not a question of whether or not to adopt cloud. It’s how and why, and answering those questions can take years. Why do you think enterprise architects are so stressed out? Wouldn’t you be?
Source: The Cloud Infographic
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