The cloud is a term that I first heard about over ten years ago. I was really into
Microsoft and the launch with Windows 2000. Steve Balmer talked about these magical
services. These new magical services would sit out on the Internet, they would sit on powerful
machines but that really didn't matter. What was important to me is that I saw limitations melt
away. The need to plan, rack and stack, cable, assign IPs, all of that was over. Of course
someone, somewhere had to deal with that but you no longer did.
Of course at the time people thought that Microsoft would stop selling Windows. Software would no longer sell software and that it would all be rented. The subscription model had been born but not fully realized. It took ten years before Microsoft would talk about the cloud again. While I had heard about this for a long time it took my wife to ask me what the cloud is that I knew that it had arrived. She had just watched a commercial by Microsoft for the cloud. The challenge with it is that the exact workings of this cloud weren't described. The people in the commercial used some online applications "in the cloud". Which to me it translated to "hey people use
our service to do things without the need for fancy applications.
This made me happy because isn't this is what the cloud is supposed to be? Its a magical pool of compute that can make your wildest dreams occur. The only challenge is you need to bring the dream. Insert one dream into the cloud and perhaps a game changing idea will come out. There are many companies that tapped into a shared cloud and turned that
into gold.
Zynga, a maker of Internet games that run primarily on Facebook, is hosted in the cloud or Amazon EC2 to be exact. As needed they add and remove virtual servers. This reduces costs buy never really owning or having to upgrade anything. In this case the cloud made a cost effective business possible by having an on demand compute environment.Another excellent example is Dropbox. Allows you to synchronize files between your desktop and the "cloud" in this case Amazon's S3. It makes backup, sharing, and multi-client synchronization simple. I have been using Dropbox for a while but I knew the service had made it when I recently saw some banking executives sharing files through it.
I think what is so exciting to me is that in the 1960's and 1970's saw the garage revolution for creating technology outside of he labs at some business minded company. Here you had revolutionaries making computing devices that changed the world overnight. From Jobs and Wozniack in Palo Alto to the software revolution that became Linux in the 1990's. Linus Torvalds didn't set out to create the largest project for collaboration in human history, he wanted make a faster
way to dial into his University.
Today is the time of the cloud. Today anyone can launch a application that can scale over the entire world. Today anyone can make a game changing service that you could never live with out. What is so
exciting is that it can be done by a few people and litterally reach millions overnight. While I wish I had the opportunities that Jobs and Woz had I think today is equally as exciting. Dream up an application or service and launch it into the cloud. The underlying architectiure of servers, switches, and security is still very important but it is abstracted from the group that launches the applications. Its something thats best left up to the cloud providers and kept in the back of the minds of the developers. So when someone asks you what is the cloud you can easily answer that its the place that dreams are made of.
