Quarantine and self-isolation have significantly impacted the online growth of businesses. Companies are changing their concepts of customer interaction, and new services are emerging. This has its advantages. While some organizations may return to traditional work formats as soon as restrictions are lifted, many others, having recognized the benefits of the internet, will continue to develop online. This, in turn, will allow many internet companies, including cloud services, to further grow. But how did the cloud actually evolve? Cloud4Y introduces you to a concise and straightforward history of the industry's development.
Birth
It is impossible to pinpoint an exact birth date for cloud computing. However, 2006 is often considered a starting point, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated in an interview following the Search Engine Strategies Conference: "A new model of computing systems is being born before our eyes, and I believe that there aren't many people who can grasp the unfolding perspective. The essence of it is that services supporting data and architecture are hosted on remote servers. The data resides on these servers, and necessary computations are performed there... And if you have a computer, laptop, mobile phone, or other device with the appropriate access rights, you can access this cloud."
Around the same time, Amazon realized that its work in supply chain management and retail had led to significant advancements in easily deployable IT service infrastructure, such as computing or database storage. So why not try to start making a profit by offering these services to clients as well? This is how Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud emerged, the predecessor of Amazon Web Services (AWS) β a well-known yet problem-free cloud service provider.
For several years, AWS dominated the cloud computing market, leaving others (mostly smaller) companies with only a small market share. By 2010, however, other IT giants realized that they too should get into the 'cloud business.' Interestingly, although Google came to this conclusion earlier, it was Microsoft that announced the launch of its public cloud (Windows Azure) in 2008. However, Azure only became operational in February 2010. That same year saw the release of an important project for the cloud space and the concept of 'Infrastructure as a Service' (IaaS) β OpenStack. As for Google, it didn't fully launch until late 2011, when Google App Engine transitioned from an extended beta to what became known as Google Cloud.
New tools
All these clouds were built using virtual machines (VMs), but managing VMs with traditional sysadmin tools presented quite a challenge. The solution was the rapid development of DevOps. This concept combines technologies, processes, and a culture of interaction within the team. Simply put, DevOps is a set of practices focused on close collaboration between development specialists and IT support specialists, as well as the mutual integration of their workflows.
Thanks to DevOps and the ideas of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD), the clouds gained the flexibility in the early 2010s that helped them become commercially successful products.
Another approach to virtualization (you probably guessed this would be about containers) began to gain popularity in 2013. It significantly changed many processes in cloud environments, influencing the development of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Yes, containerization wasn't exactly new technology, but by around 2013, Docker made deploying applications and servers extremely convenient and easy, providing cloud providers and the industry as a whole with containers.
Containers and serverless architecture
A logical step was the development of this technology, and in 2015, Kubernetes was introduced as a tool for managing containers. A couple of years later, Kubernetes became the standard for container orchestration. Its popularity contributed to the growth of hybrid clouds. Whereas previously such clouds utilized cumbersome software designed for other tasks to combine public and private clouds, Kubernetes has simplified the creation of hybrid clouds.
At the same time (in 2014), AWS introduced the concept of serverless computing along with Lambda. In this model, application functionality is delivered not in virtual machines or containers, but as scalable services in the cloud. This new approach also influenced the growth of cloud computing.
Thus, we have quickly arrived at the present day. Just ten years ago, the understanding of cloud was quite different, and the concept itself was more hypothetical than real. If one could take any spherical IT director in a vacuum from 2010 and ask him whether he was planning to transition to the cloud, we would have been laughed at. The idea seemed too risky, bold, and fantastic.
Today, in 2020, everything is different. Moreover, "thanks to" a new virus, cloud environments have become the focus of companies that previously did not consider the possibility of using such technologies. Those who were already utilizing cloud solutions were able to soften the blow to their business. As a result, IT directors can now be asked not if they plan to transition to the cloud, but how they manage their cloud, which tools they use, and what theyβre lacking.
Our Time
It can be expected that the current situation will lead to the emergence of new tools that expand the functionality and flexibility of cloud environments. We are following developments with interest.
We would also like to note another point: businesses that offered the service of translating offline business processes to online even before the pandemic are trying to attract new clients by offering special conditions. For example, Cloud4Y offersfor a period of up to two months. Other companies also have attractive offers that would be hard to obtain during normal times. So, for the digitalization of business, which politicians have talked about so much, the most favorable conditions have now been created β take advantage of them, test, and verify.
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Source: habr.com
