Cloud Journey : First Baby Step

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step

Lao Tzu

A question keeps popping my head a while back, a few years may be “Why shouldn’t I start the Cloud Journey”. As many others, I felt anxiety, fear and unknown. Mainly because I didn’t try to put on the hat of businessman. I was ordinary developer, process, and result driven person in the world of best practices, awesome technology stacks and fancy terminology. 

Until lately, I start enjoying challenging myself both mentally and physically when I decided to be a long distance runner. I progressed fast and on my way to complete first 50 KM race in coming end of September 2018. The deep inside reason of my pursuit is to embrace the challenge and create a strong foundation for future pursuits in all aspects of my life in which I am a Daddy, Husband, Clean Coder, Tech Leader, Architect, Agilist and Runner. I start to make myself think more like Tech Leader and Architect, not just do the ordinal job as I used to do. It is just by such small change, the Cloud Journey become obviously sensible to me.

I start looking at where I am at now (2018) and trying to feel and learn from other anticipations what will happens in 10, 20, and 30 years time in Cloud space. I image myself living in a whole new world in electronic devices are interconnected and self autonomously operated. For example, self driving cars that could operate on their own defined route with precise timing (makes fluent traffic flows be possible) and could perform self charging function at any Charge Station upon certain fuel condition. I image self learning algorithm be part of smart devices brain that make them operate more efficient (certainly to a degree of their purpose focusing on certain function). Under those living e-devices is Cloud network in which those devices send and receive information and commands. Cloud network will certainly be a layer in which we human putting the best brains and effort to set boundary and control those devices. 

Enough of those fantasy. Let me get to the reality by sharing some key information that I have learnt during my Cloud Journey so far. 

The History until Date

• 1999: Saleforces.com started as the first SaaS
• 2002: Amazon started AWS
• 2005: AWS introduced EC2
• 2008: Gartner promoted “Company-owneed hardware and software assets will soon be transformed into per-use service-based models”. It means a strong prediction on success of SaaS and IaaS in coming years
• 2009: Web 2.0 was introduced.  Google participated via google docs.
• 2010:
  • Feb MS released Azure.
  • Jul Rackspace Hosting and Nasa introduced open source cloud software OpenStack
• 2011: IBM introduced SmartCloud framework to support Smarter Planet
• 2012: Jun Oracle introduced Oracle Cloud
• 2013: Google released Google Compute Engine
• 2016: Three popular model of cloud: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
  

• 2018:

Enterprise Public Cloud Adopton

First question I want to understand and answer is Why Cloud ? what benefits to business to move to cloud 

Why Cloud ?

• Easily deploy-able models 
• Simplified IT management and maintenance 
• Built-in Security 
• Remote access
• Cost efficient 
• Reliable delivery, management and support services

To understand the Cloud advantages, it’s also important to understand the characteristics of Cloud. 

Cloud key characteristics 

• Agility 
• Cost reduction: change from capital expenditure to operational expenditure 
• Device and location independence 
• Ease of maintenance 
• Multi-tenancy: enable sharing of resources and costs among users
• Performance 
• Resource pooling 
•  Productivity 
• Scalability and elasticity via on-demand provisioning of resource on a fined-grained, self-service basis near real-time
• Security: supports both kernel modeling and audit log. 

According to National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST), Cloud has five essential characteristics   

• On-demand self-service
  • A consumer can provision computing capacities, server time, network storage as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider 
• Board network access
  • Capabilities available over the network and accessed through standard mechanism that promoted use by thin or thick client platforms (mobile devices, PC, tablets etc.)
• Resource pooling
  • Pooled to serve multiple consumers using multi-tenant model with different physical and virtual resource dynamically assigned according to user demand 
• Rapid elasticity 
  • Elastically provisioned and released to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand
• Measured service
  • Automatically control and optimized resources use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (storage, processing, bandwidth and active user account). 
  • Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported, providing transparency for both provider and consumer of utilized services. 

Wow, it seems a big steps so far, does’t it. Well, not really I  would say. For me the Cloud Journey just starts. This article aims to provide some fundamental facts and raise the awareness and trigger curiosity. If you are interested, keep watching out for future posts in this series. 

What next ?

In next article I will write out Cloud models, business adoption option, services available and trends. 

Until we meed again, happy learning and clouding !

Cheers!
Mike