The above sums up what I have always believed about the cloud, or as some people are now calling it Cloud 1.0. That’s all it really was for a while, you store your precious data on someone else’s datacentre.
Okay, so the massive upsurge in virtualisation made that possible, everyone decided to throw away the tin (server hardware), and invest in VMware technology, as it, for a long time, was the only shows in town. Cloud 1.0 had two main effects on the world of IT, cost was driven down by buying one Host/Hypervisor and all of a sudden you would run multiple systems from that one server. Don’t underestimate the impact of that. For a time, it was like a frontier town, there was a gold rush, the business all of a sudden could get what they wanted system wise, not that the systems were any better than before, but they could fire it onto a virtual platform and could do so repeatedly, but as always with these paradigm shifts the problems become apparent, there were more and more Virtual Machines to be managed and the Server hosting them couldn’t keep up, so investment in more “tin” became needed. IAAS, infrastructure as a service became unwieldy and couldn’t keep up with the businesses need for agility and changing demand.
So, the business started to distrust this new-fangled Cloud caper and the next iteration was born.
What exactly is cloud 2.0 and how did it change and evolve?
It’s a term that applies to software and platforms rather than physical infrastructure I mentioned above IAAS. This was the evolution away from the mere delivery of server platforms that the business would then have to install and configure a system, or ask an already overworked IT department to do it for them, think of it this way, IAAS meant the quick provision of server platforms as an empty shell. Cloud 2.0 allows the quick provision and rapid deployment of software systems, tiered server systems spun up with front end web applications connected to a back-end database that need little to no manual intervention, you need something then have a look on the corporate portal and spin yourself a software system quite quickly, SAAS, software as a service. The driver behind this has been the social networking boom we have seen in recent years, people don’t have the patience to wait lengthy periods of time for new features and systems to come out any more, they want it quickly and they want it now, hence the move to SAAS over IAAS.
Cloud 2.0’s battle lines were drawn between the private and public cloud, did we as consumers of this service allow our precious data locally in custom built datacentres or go out to the likes of Google or Amazon, and I think that was one of the most prevalent aspects of Cloud 2.0 local storage of data or remote, after all for a lot of people that’s what the cloud more or less entails, where your data sits and the added convenience of manipulating that data with easily spun up systems in the software as a service datacentre, one or two clicks and you had a system. Google drive became the vanguard of the Cloud revolution, people realised they could work and play almost entirely online.
This is the bold new frontier, it’s only now becoming apparent what this may actually entail, this is where the balance will lie as to where data sits. Data grows exponentially and do we manipulate and exploit this big data by ourselves anymore or look at the economies of scale offered by giant companies like Google or Amazon? Datacentres will have to keep up with rapid expansion of retained data, building and warehouses will be given over to the new datacentre model, where server clusters get bigger and bigger.
Chinese tech giant Huawei see the future, Cloud 3.0, being defined as platform as a service, where we
“"consume applications rather than running servers in someone else's datacenter".
See the following for more information.
Where ever we are headed we are in for some interesting times, whether it Hyper converged datacenter technology, where the software centric approach is closely integrated with SPU, storage and networking, or its Matrix proportioned datacenters processing the Big Data accumulated from the IoT, think about that for a moment, your toaster and kettle connected to the Net as well as your fridge, your fridge tells your toaster that its run out of bread and then orders some as well as some milk for the tea that kettle knows you like milky in the mornings, one person’s preferences but extended to the world, all that data transmitted and held and processed somewhere.
Skynet?
It's funny and frightening how quick the Cloud has evolved, it sued to be it was a defined by place, as in where your data sat, now that data has grown so much it needs to sit somewhere else and its our attempt to do something with it that has changed, who knows where we will end up, but it will be an interesting journey.
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