Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS)

Chapter 16

Final Thoughts

People in any organization are always attracted to the obsolete—the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

—Peter Drucker

Cloud computing will disrupt today’s businesses in countless ways. Start-ups have been blazing the trail by embracing the pay-as-you-go model and quickly bringing innovative solutions to market at a fraction of the price that was possible in the past. At the time this book was being written, enterprises were reaching a tipping point where they were finally overcoming their fears of the cloud and were starting to make substantial investments to start moving workloads into the cloud. Cloud computing is relatively immature, but it is evolving rapidly. So much has changed in the time while I was writing this book that I had to go back and update many chapters after I completed the first version. The speed at which change is happening is remarkable. We have entered a golden era of innovation, and I truly believe that the cloud era long term will have as big of an impact on society as the industrial age did, if not bigger.

The Cloud Is Evolving Rapidly

When I first started building software in the cloud back in 2008, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was only being used by start-ups and websites or for ad hoc tasks, but hardly any enterprises were using it for anything substantial. Enterprises were concerned about the lack of security and reliability in the public cloud. The early ...