Cloud computing has been evolving for half a century. Despite a recent surge in adoption, the industry did not emerge until the recent decade. With the growing popularity of mobile devices, video streaming, and workspace collaboration, cloud computing is increasingly permeating more aspects of our lives. Even after a decade of growth, the industry is still rapidly expanding and growing in certain areas.
Before we talk about the future of cloud computing, here’s a brief timeline of how cloud computing has evolved since the very beginning.
The Early Days of Cloud computing
1960s Mainframe: Initial concepts about time-sharing were developed. Computer scientists started to submit data processing jobs to different data centers with operators running on IBM’s mainframes.
1970s Virtualization: Software products were launched on virtual servers with shared hosting environments.
1997 Cloud Computing: Prof. Ramnath Chellappa coined the phrase “Cloud Computing” and defined it, “A computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone.”
2006 Public Cloud: In August 2006, Amazon created subsidiary Amazon Web Services and introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It would allow users to access remote computers and run applications on them.
2008 Private Cloud: The idea of enclosed cloud computing infrastructure that’s owned and managed by the organization rather than cloud providers was born.
2011 Hybrid Cloud: The idea of combining public and private cloud infrastructure for shared security responsibilities, and tighter data controls was born.
2014 Multi-Cloud: The idea of combining on-premise and cloud computation resources, or across several cloud-hosting environments for application deployments was born.
2010: The Rise of Distributed Data Warehousing
In the recent decade, companies started to embrace the idea of a “single source of truth” for their data assets. Though this concept of data warehousing has been around since the 1980s, it did not gain popularity until the creation of the public cloud and distributed computing. The newer technologies ensure that data can be processed at unprecedented amounts with faster-than-ever speed.
The data warehouses help connect a company’s data sources together while providing a stable, secure way of data querying, and analytics. These warehouses typically sit directly on top of existing cloud infrastructure and they are mostly managed by the company IT teams of software engineers, and data engineers.
2020: Exploding data in the pandemic era
The public health crisis in 2020 forced millions of office workers to work remotely. Many industries from healthcare, education, finance, and retailing were completely transformed. An eruption of demand in remote video conferencing, telemedicine, workspace collaboration, and video streaming began to require more and more cloud computing resources.
This growing trend of digitalization has caused cloud infrastructure providers to scale up their capacity networks to support higher usage. On the user’s side, employees of different roles are relying more and more on cloud computing and its applications such as big data processing, software development, design implementation, project management, and more.
2021 and beyond: Democratization of distributed computing
If democracy means empowering the weak by providing equal access to scarce resources, then, no doubt, cloud computing is a democratizing force. However, there are still many great hurdles to cloud computing becoming the “telephone” and “electricity”. IT services at companies are still highly customizable and done on a case-by-case basis. On a daily basis, millions of IT tasks are still handled by specialized experts who rely on a great variety of tools.
The front end of the software is going through rapid changes as we spend more and more time on screen. This brings about a powerful democratizing force called the “no-code development platform”. This describes a type of software that allows users to develop applications with a graphical user interface while
Currently, cloud computing and its vast processing power are still held in the hands of software developers and experienced engineers. This might change dramatically as more no-code solutions become available. Here are some notable examples of existing no-code development platforms.
App Development
Airtable
Quickbase
Database management
Acho Studio
E-Commerce Store
Shopify
BigCommerce
RPA
Zapier
Website Builder
Webflow
Wix.com
WordPress
Many of these tools are still yet to leverage the full power of cloud computing. The core value propositions for cloud computing are
1. No upfront costs for IT infrastructure. Services are elastic and provided on demand.
2. Distributed computing makes big data processing a lot faster and efficient.
3. Collaboration helps multiple users access a central database on the cloud
By these metrics, there is a long way to go for this no-code software. In the current state, no-code solutions are far from being the dominating force of cloud computing. However, who would have thought a simple GUI for a calculator, notepad, and calendar named Windows 1 released in 1985 would completely revolutionize personal computing as we know it today? Maybe, the best days of cloud computing may still be way ahead of us.
Source: analyticsinsight.net
