Chapter 16. History, Critiques, Futures
Grid computing enabled on-demand access to computing, storage, and other
services, but its impact was primarily limited to science [
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]. (One exception
was within the enterprise, where “enterprise Grids” were widely d eployed. These
deployments are today o ften called “private clouds,” with the principal difference
being the use of virtualization to facilitate dynamic resource provisioning.) The
emergence of cloud computing around 2006 is a fascinating story of marketing,
business model, and technological innovation. A cynic could observe, with some
degree of truth, that many a rticles from the 1990s and early 2000s on grid computing
could be—and often were—republished by replacing every occurrence of “grid”
with “cloud.” But this is more a comment on the fashion- and hype-driven nature
of technology journalism (and, we fear, much academic research in computer
science) than on cloud itself. In practice, cloud is about the effective realization
of the economies of scale to which early grid work aspired but did not achieve
because of inadequate suppl y and demand. The success of cloud is due to profound
transformations in these and other aspects of the computing ecosystem.
Cloud is driven, first an d foremost, by a transformation in demand. It is
no accident that the first successful infrastructure-as-a-service business emerged
from an e-commerce provider. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tel ls the story,
Amazon realized, after its first dramatic expansion, that it was building out
literally hundreds of similar work-unit computing systems to support the different
services that contributed to A mazo n’s online e-commerce platform. Each such
system needed to be able to sca le rapidly its capacity to queue requests, store
data, and acquire computers for data processing. Refactoring across the different
services produced services like Amazon’s Simple Queue Service, Simple Storage
Service, and El astic Computing Cloud. Those services (and other similar services
from other cloud providers, as described in previous chapters) have in turn been
successful in the marketplace because many other e-commerce businesses need
similar capabilities, whether to host simple e-commerce sites or to provide more
sophisticated services such as video on demand .
Cloud is also enabled by a transformation in transmission. While the U.S . and
Europe still lag behind broadband leaders such as South Korea and Japan, the
number of households with megabits per second or faster connections is large and
growing. One consequence is the widespread adoption of data-intensive services
such as YouTube and Netflix. Another is th at businesses feel increasingly able to
outsource bu sin ess processes such as em ail , customer relationship management,
and accou nting to software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors.
Finally, cloud is enabled by a transformation in supply. Both IaaS vendors and
companies offering consumer-facing services (e.g., search: Google, auctions: eBay,
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