Table of contents
What convenience does "cloud" bring?
How is global cloud computing developing?
What else do you expect from cloud computing?
On August 9, 2006, at the Search Engine Conference, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt proposed the concept of "Cloud Computing". .
Some people believe that it is the concept of cloud computing proposed by Amazon, because as early as March 2006, Amazon officially launched the elastic computing cloud service, which should be regarded as the real pioneer of cloud computing at the technical level. By.
Cloud computing is to provide dynamically scalable and cheap computing services on demand through the network , and it is a service related to information technology, software, and the Internet.
First of all, cloud computing provides an on-demand rental business model. Customers need to build information systems, and only need to rent all the computing resources they want from cloud computing providers (such as Huawei Cloud) through the Internet, and these resources It can be billed accurately.
In short, cloud computing is not a new network technology, but a new network application concept .
The core concept of cloud computing is to take the Internet as the center, provide fast and secure cloud computing services and data storage on the website, so that everyone who uses the Internet can use the huge computing resources and data centers on the network.
So, what kind of Internet environment was cloud computing born in? What changes has it brought to the development of the enterprise? In the Web3 era, what expectations should people have for the future of cloud computing?
Where does "cloud" come from?
Cloud refers to a virtual resource pool formed by virtualizing servers. Compared with physical servers, the cloud saves resource costs and is easier to manage.
The cloud is an upgrade to the Internet. Its focus is to present Internet products in the form of services and turn Internet software into services .
In the most basic sense, cloud computing is a large-scale storage service. In the concept of computer, it is system computing, so it is called "cloud".
In fact, to be precise, neither Google nor Amazon is the inventor of cloud computing. The concept of cloud computing was proposed much earlier than we imagined.
The history of cloud computing can be traced back as far as 1959. British computer scientist Christopher Strachey published an academic paper entitled "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computer" at the International Information Processing Conference. .
The concept of "virtualization" was formally proposed in the paper, and virtualization is the core of cloud computing infrastructure and the foundation of cloud computing development .
In 1961, Professor John McCarthy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed the concept of Utility Computing (public computing service) for the first time at the centennial celebration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Influenced by McCarthy's views, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Information Processing Technology Office under the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency jointly launched the famous MAC project.
The goal of the MAC project is to develop a "computer system that can be used by multiple people at the same time". In fact, this is the embryonic form of "cloud" and "virtualization" technologies.
After several years of development, in 1969, ARPANET, a computer network researched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was born. ARPANET was later the Internet.
So far, the three underlying technologies that cloud computing relies on have all emerged. The operating system used to manage physical computing resources is used to distribute resources to multiple people, and the virtualization technology used at the same time is used for remote access to the Internet.
In the 1990s, computers experienced explosive growth, and a series of companies represented by Cisco also flourished.
Before the rise of cloud computing, for most enterprises, self-procurement of hardware and rental of IDC computer rooms were the mainstream IT infrastructure construction methods.
At this stage, allowing more users to use network services conveniently and quickly has become an urgent problem to be solved in the development of the Internet. Processing Services.
Although the "cloud computing" service was first proposed and implemented in 2006, it was not until 2008 that the entire industry ushered in the official "lights of thousands of families".
If someone mentioned the concept of "cloud" many years ago, perhaps most people would still feel "unintelligible", but now cloud computing has gone through more than ten years, and after years of rapid growth, with various cloud The scale of computing manufacturers is getting bigger and bigger, and the growth rate of cloud computing has also entered a stage of stabilization .
What convenience does "cloud" bring?
With the continuous maturity of cloud technology and the reduction of adoption cost, both Internet enterprises and traditional enterprises and institutions are gradually turning to cloud servers.
The cloud server is easy to operate, low in cost, supports multi-regional coverage, and has stable broadband . Users can obtain access rights through any mobile device anytime, anywhere, providing small and medium-sized enterprises with a favorable opportunity to compete with large enterprises.
In addition, the cloud can also bring the following conveniences to enterprises:
- Lower deployment costs
Compared with the high hardware investment and labor cost investment of traditional servers, cloud servers adopt the method of on-demand access and pay-as-you-go. Enterprises only pay for the resources they need to use, and do not need to undertake equipment procurement and daily operation and maintenance work, and do not need Worry about the extra cost of technology iteration and equipment update.
- Data security is more reliable
The cloud server is a distributed cluster storage, avoiding single point of failure, high security and good stability; the system automatically backs up every week, and supports users to independently backup and restore data through the snapshot function to ensure data integrity and high availability, even if one of them If the server is damaged, it will not affect the normal reading of data.
- update at any time
The cloud server is built based on the cloud computing platform, the infrastructure is maintained by the cloud service provider, and the platform functions are also updated by the cloud service provider.
So users don't have to spend time and money to operate, as long as the network equipment is running normally, they can access the latest functions and features of the application at any time.
- Ensure business continuity
The ever-changing market dynamics may directly affect the business development of enterprises, bringing about service transformation and migration issues. From a technical point of view, it is very difficult to transfer business data from a physical server in one place to a physical server in another place.
But on the cloud server, it will be very easy, convenient and safe to transfer business whether it is cross-regional or global.
- Customized Solutions
The cloud server supports elastic expansion and flexible ups and downs to meet the actual application needs of different industries. Integrate website services such as bandwidth and encryption to provide a complete enterprise cloud computing solution to achieve twice the result with half the effort.
- Simplify daily operation and maintenance
Basic IT operation and maintenance has high requirements for professionalism and security. Cloud service providers not only have professional technical capabilities, but also have more network security resources and technical tools.
Using cloud servers, enterprises don't need to worry about technical management and security capabilities, and can just hand over these tasks to cloud service providers, which can also save a lot of daily costs.
Due to the different types of enterprises, business attributes and working methods, not all enterprises can give full play to their advantages and characteristics. However, the technical advantages of cloud server elastic computing can indeed help enterprises greatly improve operating efficiency and reduce company costs.
How is global cloud computing developing?
Initially, my country's cloud computing market only grew by more than one billion yuan, and now it has formed a scale of hundreds of billions of yuan, and it is showing a steady growth trend. It can be seen that the industry is developing very rapidly, and the future market space has huge potential.
From the perspective of the development of cloud computing, China has the most network users and perfect network infrastructure in the world, which enables China to have the world's largest application scenarios with the most computing power requirements, such as Double Eleven Shopping Festival, Alipay, Wufu, etc. wait.
At the same time, my country also has rapidly upgraded innovation capabilities in mobile networks, the Internet of Things, video games, and online trade. Therefore, the rapid development of cloud computing is promoting the all-round iteration of my country's technology.
Behind the rapid development speed is the intensification of competition among global cloud service providers.
According to data, during the period from 2018 to 2020, the growth rate of the market size of my country's cloud computing industry is above 30%, showing a high-speed growth trend. In 2021, the scale of China's cloud computing market has reached 322.9 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 54.4% .
However, my country's cloud companies started relatively late compared to cloud giants in other regions of the world. Alibaba Cloud, which has the best service and the earliest start, started in 2009, while most other cloud service providers started in recent years.
On a global scale, take Amazon AWS as an example. It has gone through 16 years of ups and downs since AWS started out in 2006 and has grown into the world's largest public cloud platform.
In terms of infrastructure, AWS covers 245 countries; in terms of industry leadership, AWS has been rated as the leader of the cloud computing industry by Gartner for 12 consecutive years; and in terms of market share, AWS occupies more than 1/3 of the global public cloud market .
A number of outstanding achievements prove that AWS is one of the most comprehensive cloud platforms in the world, providing more than 200 fully functional services, and the number of new functions or services launched every year is increasing rapidly. It can be said that AWS not only has millions of customers, but also has the largest and most dynamic community .
In addition to AWS, technology giant Microsoft is also full of expectations for the cloud market.
Since Nadella took office as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he has established a development strategy of "mobile first, cloud first" and devoted himself to the field of cloud computing . Under Nadella's leadership, today's Microsoft has successfully transformed from a software company in the Gates era to a cloud computing technology company, and is now actively deploying games and metaverses.
Nadella’s first acquisition as CEO was Minecraft. In January this year, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Blizzard for $68.7 billion, making Microsoft the top three game companies in the world after Tencent and Sony in terms of revenue.
This generous effort once again let the outside world see Microsoft's ambitions for the virtual world and the future construction of the Metaverse. Microsoft said that the acquisition of Blizzard will accelerate the company's growth in the cloud game business, after all, all of which will be supported by the Azure cloud, and promote the development of more computing, storage, artificial intelligence and tool integration.
Because of this, Microsoft Cloud has become Amazon's biggest challenger in the field of cloud computing.
In the case of repeated epidemics, cloud computing has become one of the businesses with explosive growth in the technology field , and there is still room for future growth of cloud businesses around the world. At this time, we are witnessing the process of rapid cloud development.
What else do you expect from cloud computing?
It's often said that the next decade of cloud computing won't be like the last decade.
With the momentum of the multi-trillion dollar tech business, cloud computing has firmly established itself on the other side of the divide . All walks of life are adopting cloud technology, and many are building their own value layer on top of the cloud.
James Gosling, the father of Java, once said: "The emergence of the concept of cloud computing is much earlier than the real realization of cloud computing. In the early days of cloud computing, people just continued to use the ordinary applications that they had already developed and run them directly on the on the cloud service provider's device."
"Until later, people began to write applications designed for the cloud environment. As a result, cloud databases and other technical solutions that cannot be seen in traditional centralized data centers emerged in the industry."
Perhaps we have witnessed that in the current cloud computing market, traditional centralized cloud platforms are occupying a mainstream position in the market, and even giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba occupy nearly 70% of the market share.
But is such a centralized cloud computing development prospect really as people expect?
As mentioned in our previous article, although centralized cloud computing has advantages, it also brings disadvantages such as dependence on the network, data leakage, and reduced flexibility due to centralization.
These status quo and hidden dangers have cast a shadow over the development of the industry, and have also planted the seeds of expectation in people's hearts for the decentralized cloud computing service method .
Over the past few years, digital transformation has set off waves across the board, and this wave of transformation has also highlighted a new fact: we still have more room and opportunity to explore.
So, what kind of surprises will the Web3 cloud combined with blockchain technology bring to people? A new chapter of the story has begun, and if you want to "ride the clouds", let us follow up one by one.