Chapter 1. What Is the Cloud?
The computing world has been marked by a series of eras or shifts, each heralded by major changes in underlying technology and business requirements. First, there was the mainframe era of the 1960s, then came the distributed computing or minicomputer era of the 1970s, the PC or highly distributed era of the 1980s, the client–server computing era of the 1990s, followed by the ubiquitous network or internet era of the early 2000s.
Currently we are in the era of cloud computing. It is enormous in size, broad in scope and importance, and is getting more so with each passing month.
To put cloud in some context, consider that as of January 2019, the two largest companies in the world by market valuation were Microsoft and Amazon. Each was valued at about $800 billion. That combined value of $1.6 trillion approximates the GDP of Canada and is more than the GDPs of Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, and Portugal combined.
Microsoft started out making software for personal computers, whereas Amazon began as an online bookseller. But, today, what is powering the expansion of these two behemoths is a common growth engine: the cloud. The cloud services these two companies sell generated nearly $50 billion in sales last year, and that is expected to double by 2020—enormous growth even by computer industry standards. More than 55 cents of every dollar Amazon earns today comes from its cloud business, even though cloud revenues amounted to only 12%.
The future of the ...