Quarantine, self-isolation - these factors have had a great impact on online business development. Companies are changing the concept of interaction with customers, new services and services are emerging. This has its advantages. And let some organizations return to the traditional format of work as soon as all restrictions are lifted. But many who have been able to appreciate the benefits of the Internet will continue to develop online. This, in turn, will allow many Internet companies to develop further, including cloud services. How did clouds evolve? Cloud4Y introduces you to the shortest and simplest history of the industry development.
Birth
It is impossible to unambiguously name the exact date of birth of cloud computing. But the starting point is 2006, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview at the end of the Search Engine Strategies Conference: perspective. Its essence is that services that support data and architecture are hosted on remote servers. The data resides on these servers, and the necessary calculations are performed on them ... And if you have a computer, laptop, mobile phone or other device with the appropriate access rights, then you can access this cloud.β
Around the same time, Amazon realized that its work in supply chain management and retail had made significant progress in easily deployable infrastructure IT services. For example, computing or storage for databases. So why not try to start making a profit by offering these services to customers as well? This is how Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud was born, the predecessor of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - a not-so-problematic but well-known cloud service provider.
For the next few years, AWS dominated the cloud computing market, leaving other (very small) companies with only a small market share. But by 2010, other tech giants realized they could do well in the cloud too. Interestingly, although Google had come to this conclusion earlier, it was beaten by Microsoft, which announced the launch of a public cloud (Windows Azure) in 2008. However, Azure really started working only in February 2010. In the same year, the release of an important project for the cloud sphere and the concept of "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) - OpenStack. As for Google, it only took off towards the end of 2011, when Google Cloud appeared after the extended beta of Google App Engine.
New tools
All of these clouds were built using virtual machines (VMs), but managing VMs using traditional sysadmin tools was a bit of a challenge. The solution has become the rapid development of DevOps. This concept combines technologies, processes and culture of interaction within the team. Simply put, DevOps is a set of practices focused on the close interaction of developers and information technology specialists, as well as the mutual integration of their workflows.
With DevOps and the ideas of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), clouds gained flexibility in the early 2010s that helped them become a commercially successful product.
Another approach to virtualization (you probably guessed that we are talking about containers) began to gain popularity in 2013. It greatly changed many processes in cloud environments, influencing the development of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Yes, containerization was not such a new technology, but around 2013, Docker made deploying applications and servers as convenient and simple as possible by offering containers to cloud providers and the industry as a whole.
Containers and serverless architecture
The logical step was the development of this technology, and in 2015 Kubernetes appeared, a tool for managing containers. A couple of years later, Kubernetes became the standard for container orchestration. Its popularity has fueled the rise of hybrid clouds. If earlier such clouds used inconvenient and tailored software to combine public and private clouds, then with the help of Kubernetes, creating hybrid clouds has become an easier task.
At the same time (in 2014), AWS introduced the concept of serverless computing along with Lambda. In this model, application functionality is not presented in virtual machines or containers, but as large-scale services in the cloud. The new approach also influenced the growth of cloud computing.
That's how quickly we came to our time. Ten years ago, the cloud was understood somewhat differently, and the concept itself was more hypothetical than real. If you could take any spherical CIO in a vacuum from 2010 and ask him if he plans to move to the cloud, then we would be laughed at. Too risky, daring, fantastic was this idea.
Today, in 2020, things are different. Moreover, "thanks" to the new virus, cloud environments have become the object of close attention of companies that, in principle, did not consider the possibility of using such technologies. And those who used cloud solutions before were able to soften the blow to the business. As a result, the CIO can no longer be asked if he plans to move to the cloud. And about how he manages his cloud, what tools he uses and what he lacks.
Our time
It can be expected that the current state of affairs 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 like to note another point: the business, which even before the pandemic offered the service of transferring the business processes of βofflineβ companies to online, is trying to attract new customers by offering special conditions. Cloud4Y, for example, offersfor up to two months. Other companies also have delicious deals that would be hard to get in normal times. So for the digitalization of business, which politicians have been talking about so much, the most favorable conditions have now been created - take it and use it, test it and verify it.
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Source: habr.com