Cloud Wars Julian Coleman...should’ve learnt how to code. As the internet started rapidly growing in the early 1990s, one of the key visions sold to users (households and businesses alike) was of a world where anything digital would be accessible from anywhere. It wouldn’t matter if you were away on a holiday, or if one of your employees was working from home, every tool and file needed would be instantly available over the internet. This would all be delivered through a concept called ‘cloud computing’. For the uninitiated, cloud computing is the delivery of different ‘pay-as-you-go’ services through the Internet, including data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software. Cloud-based storage makes it possible to save huge amounts of data to a remote database and retrieve them on demand. However, reality would take a while to catch up with that vision. Internet speeds were initially quite slow, and not conducive to adequate user experiences. Hosting all that data also required enormous numbers of physical servers and resources that wouldn’t always be economical even for large corporations. This has changed significantly over the past ten years, and improvements in speeds and capacity have driven a boom in cloud computing. The barrier to entry has drastically lowered for organisations and individuals to access these services, and this is driving innovation across almost every sector. Where in the past companies would need to invest large amounts of capital upfront for onpremise servers, cloud allows the users to pay 26
on demand for compute and scale up and down the amount of compute they need. Some of the world’s most powerful companies are currently locked in a protracted war over domination of the cloud computing market. It’s expensive to wage war but when the global cloud computing market size is expected to reach US$1.25 trillion by 2028 the reward is worth the fight. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dominated cloud computing for the past decade. But Google and Microsoft, giants themselves in the cloud market, are catching up. To understand the origins of the war over cloud computing, we have to look back to an Amazon leadership retreat at Jeff Bezos’ house in 2003. Amazon’s executive team was asked to identify the core strengths of the company. As the conversation flowed, one thing became abundantly clear: its infrastructure services gave them a huge advantage over the competition. It was at that point, without even fully articulating it, that they started to formulate the idea of what AWS could be, and they began to wonder if they could have additional business providing infrastructure services to software developers. The combination of infrastructure services and developer tools would quickly become a pseudo–operating system for the internet. On March 14, 2006, Amazon S3 cloud storage launched, followed by EC2 in August 2006. Microsoft’s answer to AWS, Azure, would not be commercially available until 2010. In the
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