Simon Oxley

So what’s this ‘cloud’ stuff all about?

@soxley

warning: this is an infrastructure biased presentation

The Cloud: according to @soxley

• Accessed via the Internet• On demand near-instant provisioning

• Elastic can supply an infinite demand

• Managed by the provider

A: Because that’s how architects draw ‘The Internet’

Q: Why is it called ‘The Cloud’?

Any service that is:

How did we get here?

1944

The Colossus at Bletchley Park

The first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park. The Colossus was

designed to break the complex Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during WWII.

Each Colossus used 1,500 vacuum tubes and a series of

pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing possible solutions to a particular code.

1953

IBM 701IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and the federal government.

The system used electrostatic storage,

consisting of 72 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1024 bits each

Rent: $11,900 monthly or more, depending upon storage capacity.

1961

IBM 1401

The IBM 1401 mainframe, the first in the series, replaced the vacuum tube with smaller,

more reliable transistors and

used a magnetic core memory.

Demand called for more than 12,000 of the 1401 computers, and the machine´s success

made a strong case for using general-purpose computers rather than

specialized systems.

1965

DEC PDP-8Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the

PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer. The PDP-8

sold for $18,000, one-fifth the price of a small IBM 360 mainframe.

The speed, small size, and

reasonable cost enabled the PDP-

8 to go into thousands of manufacturing plants, small businesses, and scientific laboratories.

1966

HP-2115Hewlett-Packard entered the

general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational

power formerly found only in much larger computers.

It supported a wide variety of

languages, among them

BASIC, ALGOL, and FORTRAN.

1981

IBM PC 5150

IBM introduced its PC, igniting a fast growth of the personal computer market.

The first PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used

Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system.

1987

IBM PS/2IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and

video graphics array standard for

IBM computers.

The first IBMs to include Intel´s 80286 chip, the company had shipped more than

1 million units by the end of the year.

Everything just got faster, smaller

and cheaper*

so why is this relevant…

from this point on, nothing really changed…

*or as Simon Wardley would say – “Commoditized”

What just happened?

Commoditization of the stack

Hardware

Operating System

Applications

Tubes, pulleys transistors integrated circuits & mass production

…common components enabling market expansion and increased competition

Step in Virtualization…Virtualization was first developed in the 1960s to partition large, mainframe hardware for better hardware utilization.

Then we started buying lots of small, cheap servers and forgot all about virtualization… until they became:

a) Difficult to manage (‘00s of physical servers, power, space, etc.)

b) Massively under-utilized (as hardware became faster)

Hardware

Operating System

Applications

Hardware

OS

App

OS

App

OS

App

…so we started to virtualize again, this time on commodity hardware

What about The Cloud?

The Cloud = Virtualization + ScaleEnabled by massive economies of scale.

• Costs are driven down

• Competition is increased

• Innovation is increased

As a result:

1.7 GB of RAM , 1 virtual core, 160GB

$0.085 per/hour

…some call this Infrastructure-as-a-Service

It’s more than just hardware…

Cloud services are alsoApplications & Platforms

Hardware

Operating System/ Platform

Applications

…more buzzwords: Platform-as-a-Service & Software-as-a-Service

Why should you care?

Because cloud services enable your businessto concentrate on what it does best.

Installing SoftwareConfiguring Servers

Backups

Deployment

System Management

Which is probably not:

Networks

We use a Cloud to represent the Internet and…

…to hide complex infrastructure and systems.

“We don’t care what happens in the cloud – it just works”

Q: Should we care?

A: Yes, and No

key elements to success in the cloud:

• Transparency open communication

• Reliability measured, reported

• Standards lock-in, choice= TRUST

…ask your cloud vendor these questions

So what’s next for The Cloud?

Some predictions…

The operating system will become irrelevant

Everything will be available ‘as a service’

A mix of very large and niche-focused providers

Spotify: A world of music music-as-a-service in the cloud

Amazon: Relational Database Service a database without server/os management overhead

Amazon: EC2, S3 etc. leading cloud innovation at a massive scale

Thank you