What is the Magic Behind the Cloud?

Have you ever sit back and thought "Why is it that the Cloud is supposed to be better than what my IT department has done for years?" "Don't we have our own Cloud like datacenter?". The reality is that the Cloud isn't made of new "fiber optics" computers, or even machines that your company couldn't buy itself. The magic is really in the simplicity of the services on top of it all.

What Is a Computer Anyway?

What has allowed the Cloud to flourish is a maturing of the virtualization software that allows for anyone to run multiple "virtual machines" on physical machines. Since not everyone knows what this means, think of it this way. You likely have a laptop or a desktop that you are using to read this article. What you really have is a mother board with a number of CPU's (Central Processing Units), a hard drive to store data, a key board, and a screen. What makes this "computer" magic is the Operation System (OS) that it is running. The same is true for your tablet computer or a mobile phone. It's really just some hardware that is running the OS. The OS is what you really think of as "The Computer".

The Cloud is Born!

Once you really understand that your hardware is just there to run the OS and make the magic happen then it's not a huge leap to think....."Could I run more than one computer on this hardware?". That is how the Cloud was born!

The Cloud is nothing but a serious of innovations that allow multiple machines to take advantage of shared CPU's, hard drives, memory, etc. The first people to take advantage of these innovations were in fact internal IT departments. They purchased "Virtualization Software" and sliced the hardware up into a bunch of "Computer Servers". This was the seed that was planted that grew into what we think of as the Cloud today.

The Rise of Cloud Vendors

As virtualization took hold it soon became apparent that a shared infrastructure could serve an enormous amount of needs. However, it was also very expensive to setup the base infrastructure to do it well. Also the cost for the people to setup the servers, load all of the virtual computer OS's and make sure they were up 99.999% (Five Nines) of the time so they could be trusted. This was a problem that only the very largest companies could afford to do well.

Companies like Amazon and Microsoft invested millions of dollars creating this shared set of virtual computers for themselves to run the services that they needed to run their business. The people who built these large data centers were really the world wide experts on how to do so since it they were pushing the technology further and faster than anyone else.

To understand how the Cloud vendors would monetize this investment, you have to look back to the last century. In the "old days" of computing all computing was done on "mainframes" that were charged to the business units by the amount of resources that they consumed. If you look at the shiny new Cloud that these companies had created, they were essentially a new form of "mainframe computing". Why not meter usage the same way?

Why Not Sell This To Others?

So the logic went something like this. "if we offer this out to others and just sell them the ability to run their own Computer/OS, they won't have to invest in this big infrastructure to get the benefits". It's really nothing more than taking something that not everyone can afford to build themselves, finding a model that allows them to share in the investment to reap the benefits, and proving it will actually work.

But how do you charge the people using these shared computers? They could have chosen to charge you for every Computer/OS that you setup in their "Cloud". But instead they decided to following the mainframe model of charging by the resources used. By allowing customers to purchase these services for only the amount of services used, it meant that you could turn on and off these computers to control your costs. All of a sudden this Cloud thing has gotten pretty interesting!

Unleashing the World's Minds

Now think if people from around the globe could get access to the hardware that they couldn't afford to purchase themselves, to solve the world' biggest problems. Think about that for a moment......A researcher in Bulgaria could have access to the computing power needed to run a worldwide company to tackle a problem like running models to determine if a type of drug could cure a disease. A physicist in Poland could run models to understand the universe and our place in it. A meteorologist in Chile could run hurricane prediction models and improve them resulting in potentially millions of saved lives.

By putting computing resources in the hands of people around the globe, a true renaissance could take hold. Now individuals can have the computing power of what used to be called "Super Computers" that were previously only available at universities and the world's largest companies. This meant that any of the 7 billion people on this planet could conceivably use these resources to make a life changing discovery that we will all benefit from.

Where Does This Go From Here?

Now that a true democratization of computing resources are available to everyone on the planet, at least for those who can afford to purchase them (yes this is still a problem), what will it mean to the world? Obviously we really don't know this answer but there are some really interesting things that we can see changing today.

New companies are forming everyday that would have not have been able to if they couldn't get these low cost Cloud services. This means that solutions to your personal and professional problems are being rolled out faster than ever before. We are also seeing the building blocks that previously had to be built by every company, becoming services that the Cloud providers are adding in to their offerings. For instance, you probably get push notifications on your mobile phone Apps. There is now a Cloud service for that. You probably watch videos that are streamed to your computer. There is now a Cloud Service for that!

To build out a new product, a product team can now weave together these Cloud services and run their product on world class computing resources. This allows them to launch a product to a world wide market with less investment needed to fund these products. This lowers the barrier of entry for entrepreneurs who see a problem worthy of tackling. A more robust ecosystem of entrepreneurs means that the world's problems can be solved in multiple ways so the best idea can win. This is a win-win for all of us! Now that is some serious magic!