Cloud Computing v2: How did the Cloud come about?

In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted a server, you needed to run it yourself. You needed to buy one, you needed to set it up, power it up, plug it in, connect it to the Internet and you needed to keep it running 24/7, keep your Internet connection on. There was a lot of work involved, just to manage a server. So then people realised they could outsource it. So data centres came along in a really big way.

The Data Centre and its Origin

So you could go to a data centre and they would set up racks of servers that you could rent for them. So you would, contact a data centre. You'd say "hey, I want a server, I want a server on the Internet, can you give me one?" And they'd generally be like: you'd have to email them, or call them, and there would be a lead time, often of a few days or a few weeks even to get these servers provisioned. So at first, they provided only infrastructure support, so they basically would provide those servers with power, with heating or cooling, electricity, etc. but then later on, people were requesting for rackspace to support the operating systems, or to support the application layer. And there was still large upfront investments: you had to pay for those servers, you had to sign lengthy contracts with the data centres, because they were obviously buying hardware for you, and they wanted to make sure you were locked in for a couple of years. So it was a relative expensive way to access computing power.

Fast forward to 2006 and Amazon comes out and launches their first Cloud platform, they launch EC2. The benefit of it was that you didn't have to worry about providing electricity, you didn't have to worry about providing the Internet, they managed all that for you, the physical security so no one could get in and steal the computers. So you were outsourcing the physical hosting of the machine to someone else. And that sort of basically changed the world, since instead of taking days or weeks or months to provision new servers, you could do it via an API* call (Application Program Interface: a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications) and you could have a virtual machine up and running.

What's a Server?

So a Server essentially is just like a powerful computer that you're able to access. Typically they're going to be rack-mounted or put into blade chassis, so they're quite flat. And they won't have a monitor that you can connect to, they don't come with a monitor. You have to basically connect into them remotely. It's just a big computer essentially.

Hmmm And what's Serverless?

With Serverless the Cloud provider like Amazon manage all of the infrastructure for you and you don't need to think about it in terms that you used to think about, you know, physical machines. You don't have to think: "oh well, I need a server in the Cloud", "I need to be able to get into it, set it up, make sure it's running my code". All I do now with Serverless is give my code to Amazon or to Microsoft or to Google. And say, "Run it whenever a Customer needs something". And that's the ultimate abstraction. They deal with the challenge of scaling that. They deal with all the operations of having people available 24/7 to fix things when things break. They provide guarantees to me as a Customer, SLAs, and I can trust them to run my code. In the future, we foresee the terms "Cloud" and "Serverless" will be synonymous.

Content: Intro to Cloud Computing Course by Cloud Guru

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