In some ways the Cloud explosion (formation?!) is similar to the .com bubble of the 90s, but far more significant. In the 90’s, whatever idea you had was generally backed by the more typical on-premise infrastructure, even in the “hosted” solutions. The cloud wasn’t a thing, much less cloud-native applications. The Internet was shiny and new, but in reality it wasn’t very shiny at all. Standardization was mostly argued amongst various groups that thought they knew best, web technologies and protocols that would allow for real innovation and scale were far from maturity, etc. And of course, there was the issue of how one acquires the hardware needed to build something.
Fast-forward 20 years, and what we have is the second Internet Gold Rush. Only now, you don’t need to invest in hardware and, while standardization is far from complete, its at a much better place than it was 20 years ago. Web technology has evolved a lot in that span of time, and with Cloud, suddenly you have a platform for building an idea that can scale from a simple proof of concept that may run you say $50 a month, to thousands of servers and millions of users–all without ever procuring a single piece of hardware and depending on how you design your Cloud application, without ever actually bearing the responsibility of managing servers. Obviously this is huge, but the icing on the cake is you don’t have to wait for resources to arrive; the resources are there, you just need the money to pay for them. And, with the general elasticity of Cloud, if you know what you’re doing you can build auto-scaling environments that dynamically adjust to the demands of your applications and data.
This is all just me rambling, of course. Stay tuned for more ramblings.
