It is likely that at some point in time we’ve been exposed to some idea of the cloud computing. Perhaps it is meaningless to some, perhaps some have a good understanding of it.
First off, when was the last time that you used your credit card?
Ok.
That was cool.
At the swipe of a card, a slough of events occurred.
You received a tasty lunch and your capital was transferred to the business who provided said lunch.
All without the need for cash.
So how does this work? Does the bank have a little box with your name on it and a courier that hurriedly rush over to every business that you purchase from?
Don’t worry, no overworked couriers here.
Somewhere along the way, we figured out that there was a better way.
Someone along the way came up with the pooling model!
Guess what?
It doesn’t just apply to money!
Nowadays, we are just a click away from configuring and provisioning computing resources.
That’s right. Someone figured out a way to pool computing power into a distributable resource!
So how does all of this work?
First, let’s take a deep breath.
So it all started a long time ago. Computers used to look more like buildings. When you were fixing broken tubes or pulling bugs out of the machine, you were hard coding circuits. Something like the below wasn’t exactly a pool-able resource.
Then came along the OS, time-sharing and the beginnings of networking.
Soon, people were logging into business owned mainframes over SSH to work digitally.
Computers became really popular and started to come in flavors like Apple or Windows, but everyone really just wanted their newest program to run.
Unfortunately we had things like hard-coupling, dependencies and vendor lock in. This software runs here, but not there. This one runs there, but not here.
Some people had some interesting ideas about this along the way.
Soon computers were running hypervisors to manage multiple virtual machines! OS level virtualization was achieved, allowing us to multi-tenant user space containers! Containers began to be orchestrated to run distributed workloads on mega corp servers all through a nice looking dashboard!
We’ve come a long way from the age of building sized computers. Computational power has been commoditized into a form that is consumable by the masses. Programmers and businesspeople alike are flocking to next new normal.
Where will that be?
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading! Tune in next week as we will be going over the basics of containers and possibly orchestration.
