The Evolution of Cloud Computing and Information Technology
The desire to eliminate human interaction, manage costs, and improve service delivery quality among businesses providing human services has resulted in creativity and innovation. For ages, technology has changed human activities on Earth, and constant development and discoveries have enabled humanity to address real-world issues. All operations are based on information that allows one to detect trends, make projections, and create references to form a foundation for capitalizing on current and future opportunities while solving pressing difficulties. The need to manage data, improve communication, and create opportunities motivated people to pursue careers in computer science and information technology. Merging of computer science and information technology. Merging of computer science and information technology provides an avenue to create more utility from the use of computers from its basic roles of data entry and basic analysis to include information sharing, advanced security through encryption, virtual storage, and wireless connectivity. Businesses running operations that are not related to information technology are able to utilize hosted information technology services from a service provider. Hosted services include information technology applications, infrastructure, storage, monitoring, security websites and email hosing over wide area networks such as the internet. Cloud computing is a vital component that has enhanced information technology in various organizations whereby, companies are able to consume information technology services conveniently. Cloud computing in general refers to the delivery of hosted services by a various providers over the internet. Cloud computing has revolutionized over time since its inception. Various hosted service providers across the globe including Amazon have also grown over time. The growth of information technology and cloud computing is as a result of the benefits that accrue to organizations from consuming hosted services. In order to understand the evolution of cloud computing and its benefits, there is need to analyze the history of cloud computing and cloud computing providers; Amazon web services.
The History of Cloud Computing
The development of the advanced information technology and cloud computing can be traced back to the 1960s. The introduction of 'intergalactic computer network' idea by JCR Licklider in the 1960s and his eventual development of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1969 marked the inception towards cloud computing. The aim of Licklider was to allow people to access data and programs and get interconnected across the globe from anywhere and at any given site. The development of the internet created an avenue towards cloud computing. However, it is only until the 1990s when the internet started offering a significant bandwidth to the users (In Vacca, 2017). The greatest step in the evolutions leading to cloud computing was the surfacing of Salesforce.com which is the pioneer developer of the enterprise application service delivery over simple websites concept in 1999. Salesforce.com allowed for both the mainstream and specialist software companies to render applications over the internet. The next step in the history of cloud computing was in 2002 when Amazon Web Services was developed. Amazon Web Services provided computation, human intelligence and storage cloud-based services over the Amazon Mechanical Turk. A commercial web service; Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) launched by Amazon in 2006 allowed individuals and small business enterprises to run computer applications through rented computers. The Amazon Cloud (EC2) marked the first cloud computing avenue service accessed across the globe. In 2009, the development of Web 2.0 for cloud computing allowed other companies including Google and other firms to provide browser-based business applications as witnessed in platforms including the Google Apps (Chopra, 2017).
The Rise of Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services traces its inception to 2002 when the company, which is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, was launched to provide distinct services based on product data and technology that would enable computer application developers to build entrepreneurial and innovative applications. The developments that led to the focus on cloud computing by Amazon Web Services were the quest to generate revenue from creating an infrastructure to sell virtual servers to businesses and organizations (Golden, 2015). Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black were the brains behind the development and the selling of virtual servers as a new investment avenue for Amazon Web Services. Simple Queue Service (SQS) launched in 2004 was the first public cloud computing avenue developed by Amazon Web Services. Christopher Brown and Pinkham later developed Amazon EC2 service. In 2006, Amazon Web Services was re-launched with a combination of the Amazon S3 cloud storage, EC2, and SQS service aimed at creating an integrated system of online services to the diverse users in demand of cloud computing. Amazon S3 allowed companies, websites, client-side applications, and other developers to store data in a secure, safe, easily accessible, and cost-efficient platform. Amazon Web Services has posted consistent and tremendous growth, with its first customer event hosted in 2012 in Las Vegas. Currently, Amazon Web Services controls 30 percent of the global cloud computing market (Bloomberg News (Firm), 2013).
Popular Services offered by Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services offers a range of popular services to consumers of cloud computing. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides top-notch Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms. With the Amazon Web Services IaaS, customers can request enough compute power to run their applications using their Application Programming Interface (API). Virtualizing hardware and software resources sit at the foundation of AWS. Using the API, EC2 customers request virtual server sizes between nano, micro, small, medium, large, and extra-large, depending on individual requirements. In terms of performance, Amazon uses the metric ECU Compute Unit, which is comparable to the AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors (Elastic, n.d.). CPU cores and memory can be increased as well to allow users to customize resources. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Glacier afford the opportunity for large corporations to securely store, move, and analyze their data on a colossal scale. S3 stores data as objects in resources called 'buckets' that are 5 terabytes in size. These objects can have control access to read, write, modify, and delete, and the administrator is able to use access audit logs. Companies can choose the region where the bucket is stored to optimize network performance, minimize costs, reduce latency, and comply with regulatory requirements (Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), 2017). Also, Amazon offers a competitive product known as Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS). As with all AWS services, RDS is easy to set up, function, and scalable, and you only pay for what you use. It also enables them to focus on applications to deliver performance, security, availability, and interoperability (Object Storage Details, 2017).
The Benefits of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing provides a range of benefits to its users across all forms of organizations across the world. The end users and the businesses utilizing cloud computing can conveniently carry out activities over the internet based on a platform that guarantees convenience and reliability. Cloud computing allows for self-service provisioning. Unlike in the typical information technology administration, cloud computing allows end users to subscribe to compute resources they need without a requirement to manage and provide compute resources. Cloud computing is quite flexible (Chopra, 2017). Companies can increase and reduce the compute resource needs depending on the operational scale of the given business or end user. The flexibility of cloud computing eliminates wastage of resources invested in building infrastructure that could be unnecessary in the future. Cloud computing costing is based on granular levels, thereby enabling the businesses to pay for the workloads and resources used only. The implementation of redundant resources in cloud computing allows for workload resilience as important workloads are kept running and ensure user storage management. Also, cloud computing allows users to migrate workloads from one provider to another and from or to the cloud at their convenience.
Conclusion
The development of cloud computing has been as a result of the changing needs of the various stakeholders in the information technology field. The companies providing cloud computing aim at creating conveniences for their customers while ensuring that the given companies remain profitable and maintain sustainable growth. Amazon Web Services has been able to control a remarkable market in cloud computing across the globe by incorporating creativity in the development of its products to ensure that they meet customer demands. Individuals and organizations adopting cloud computing are bound to benefit from cost-effective and flexible services offered by hosted service providers as opposed to setting up their own infrastructure. The cloud computing has made remarkable advances over time; however, the changing needs of individuals and organizations are bound to lead to more innovations in cloud computing.
References
Bloomberg News (Firm). (2013). Amazon web services: The new frontier of cloud. New York: Bloomberg. 2013.
Chopra, R. (2017). Cloud computing: A self-teaching introduction. Dulles, Virginia: Mercury learning and Information. 2017
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). 2017. Cloud Server & Hosting – AWS. (n.d.). Retrieved November 28, 2017, from https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Golden, B. (2015). Amazon web services for dummies. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons Inc. 2015.
In Vacca, J. R. (2017). Cloud computing security: Foundations and challenges. Boca Raton: CRC Press. 2017.
Object Storage Details – Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) – AWS. (n.d.). Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://aws.amazon.com/s3/details/
