Repost: Cloud computing is to computing, what the Internet is to telecommunications.

(originally posted 2011-03-03)

Twenty years ago, if I wanted a reasonably fast data connection between a computer in Seattle and one in San Francisco, I had to call The Phone Company. Contracts would be negotiated and signed, Purchase Orders would be sent, Expensive Machines would be shipped, Work Orders would be generated and executed on, and well-trained well-paid Union Men would provision and test the link, which would be from a specific geographic point, to another specific geographic point. And I would be presented with a monthly Expensive Bill.

Ten years ago, that started to change, dramatically. All that complex hardware, cabling, installation, and cost-recovery got abstracted away by TCP/IP. Today, to get a much faster and much more flexible connection, I just click on a hyperlink, and or start a VPN, and I have a connection that lats a few seconds to a few hours, for just as long as I need it, and then the underlying real hardware forgets completely about me and my data, and gives some other random person the link they need.

Ten years ago, if I need to run "back office" software for an company, or if I wanted to run a web site, I would again have to do the whole Contracts, Purchase Order, Expensive Machine, Work Order and so forth. And again, there would be a big monthly bill, plus a big capex spend too.

About 5 years ago, that started to change, dramatically. All that "stuff" got abstracted away. With the type of a command, or the click of a UI button, machine instances spin up to do my work, and when I am done with them, the underlying real hardware forgets completely about me and my workload, and gives some other random person the work they need.

Cloud computing is to computing, what the Internet is to telecommunications.