10 Years in the Cloud

2016 is a big year. It's the 10 year anniversary of the modern cloud era kicked off by Amazon Web Services. When Ernst Oddsund, James Andrews and I were doing Digibug back then, we were a classic candidate for on-demand scalable infrastructure - paying a large monthly fixed cost for leased hardware and colocation even when our site was largely idle (we were doing photo prints and gifts - very seasonal).

In June(ish) 2006 I posted on an AWS forum about our need for some compute resources local to the S3 storage we wanted to use for archiving all of our customer's images. A BDM manager reached out to me to have a chat and (under NDA) briefed me on their forthcoming EC2 service and I was hooked. Note - he's still at AWS and having a great career!

While we joined the beta for EC2 later that summer, we never got Digibug onto AWS because we sold off our core web property to our main client shortly thereafter. It didn't matter - from then on I knew that the future would be in the cloud.

Fast forward to today and AWS is heading for a $50B+ ($100B?) business and, along with Google and Microsoft, disrupting IT in a way that hasn't happened since the rise of the Web. In fact, cloud is far more disruptive than simply changing the application architecture from client/server to Web - it changes every single aspect of IT.

From infrastructure to platforms to operations to security & governance to economics to procurement to application architecture to data and more, cloud computing is disrupting, transforming and forever changing how we think about IT. 

It's been an amazing decade, but the best is yet to come. What the next decade will look like is anybody's guess, but you can bank on the fact that it will be even more amazing!