Impact of cloud computing on the IT industry

Impact of cloud computing on the IT industry

About every 15 years, the IT industry will undergo a revolutionary change. Different Technical Forces collide and roll over each other, and ultimately generate a revolutionary force that can change the entire industrial ecology. We believe that cloud computing is such a force that will fundamentally change the IT industry. From the history of computing evolution, we can find that each computing age has its own deep brand, and it also has its own dominant enterprises. Both IBM in the Host Age, Microsoft in the PC age, and Google in the Web Age are outstanding representatives of their respective eras. The impact of cloud computing on the IT industry is undoubtedly huge and far-reaching. We believe that it will bring epoch changes. When the cloud computing era comes, the IT industry will face a shuffling and will surely be the leader in this era. This process of switching between old and new is painful for traditional manufacturers, but the huge business opportunities it breeds will prompt everyone to join the wave of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is changing the information industry landscape. It will turn IT infrastructure into a pay-as-you-go public infrastructure like water and electricity. It will change the development and deployment methods of the software industry, it is as efficient as the traditional industrial assembly line, greatly simplifying it management for enterprises, effectively reducing IT infrastructure costs for enterprises, and reducing the difficulty for individuals to use information services, and comprehensively improve the overall information level of society.

Figure 1.20 impact of cloud computing on the IT industry

1.6.1 hardware model change

One of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore, published an article in 1965 saying that the number of transistors and resistors in the chip doubles every year, which means that the performance and capacity of Semiconductors will grow exponentially, this growth trend will continue. In 1975, Moore corrected this rule again, and he thought the number of transistors would double every 24 months. Moore's law describes an empirical law of computer processing chips, but many hardware in the IT industry has similar development rules. In the past few decades, the development of chips basically conforms to Moore's Law. However, as the traditional chip manufacturing process gradually approaches the physical limits, the single-core processor has encountered a huge obstacle to further improve the transistor density. Smart chip engineers have designed a work ing method that uses multi-core chips to achieve "horizontal expansion" rather than "vertical expansion", thus improving the total number and performance of transistors. This multi-core architecture adopts the "divide and conquer" method. By dividing tasks, applications can make full use of multiple kernels and improve chip performance through parallel computing.

The emergence of cloud computing has also changed the hardware model in a similar way. In the traditional hardware model architecture, if a higher processing capability and a larger storage space are required, people generally need to use more advanced and powerful servers, for example, select a large server or a high-end minicomputer. However, as the scale of applications grows, especially for many applications on the Internet, this method poses multiple challenges to users. For example, the system has limited vertical scalability. No matter what type of server, the processor and memory that can be expanded are relatively limited. In addition, for large-scale applications, the system construction cost in this mode is relatively high. Because traditional mainframe and minicomputers do not adopt standardized construction methods, their costs remain high. The emergence of cloud computing has led people to rethink how hardware platforms are built. Most cloud computing platforms currently adopt standardized and low-cost hardware, and then scale horizontally through software to build a large and stable computing platform. We believe that this is the future "host", which will be times better than traditional hosts, but the cost is only a fraction of the latter.

1.6.2 application model change

Resources in the traditional infrastructure or system platform cannot be dynamically configured. Therefore, when designing applications, you must consider the implementation of your own business logic. Application monitoring and management are implemented through other system management software such as system center and Tivoli. Some well-managed applications can be used to dynamically adjust some resources through these system management software. However, these traditional applications are not aware of the running status of the underlying platform. With the emergence of cloud computing, the automation of applications has gradually become possible. These applications with runtime environment awareness functions can be called self-sensing applications ).

The emergence of self-awareness applications is a trend of application development and a manifestation of automation in the process of application running. In traditional application design, we focus on functional requirements, while manual configuration is often used for some non-functional requirements. The emergence of cloud computing platforms makes computing platform resources programmable, therefore, in the architecture design of an application, we can use some interfaces of the infrastructure platform to perceive the actual running status of the application, in addition, you can dynamically adjust the Running Resources of the application based on access conditions to achieve a complete set of automatic program running.

The cloud computing platform has programmable resource allocation, so we can also set an automated deployment process, that is, to allow applications to automatically complete deployment, upgrade, and other work. Automatic deployment is also a prerequisite for dynamic expansion of applications. In this way, when more computing instances are needed to process more user requests, new computing instances can be dynamically generated and automatically enabled. From the perspective of application models, the emergence of cloud computing platforms allows developers to quickly build highly available and almost scalable applications.

Self-sensing applications are a manifestation of the development of applications towards an independent and autonomous unit. When designing, application architects are faced with abstract and almost infinite computing resources at the underlying layer, rather than physical resources in the traditional sense. From another perspective, this design method is also a manifestation of loose coupling between applications and the underlying computing platform, so that the application is not bound to specific physical hardware. The cloud computing platform provides almost unlimited computing, storage, and network resources from the underlying layer. The applications on the platform are like independent units with artificial intelligence. They are not doing their own business, it also provides self-management and self-repair functions.

From the perspective of user service usage, another change in the application model is that the way users consume services is more flexible. With the emergence of cloud computing, a large amount of computing work has been gradually migrated from terminal devices to cloud computing platforms. Therefore, the computing requirements for terminal devices have declined. We can see that more and more terminal devices, such as PCs, tablets, and smartphones, can become the way users use services.

1.6.3 service model change

Cloud computing makes the socialization of information services possible. It has changed and refined public demands and gave birth to new markets and services. The Information Service Mode will gradually change to a service mode similar to the traditional public facilities, that is, the mode of centralized supply and billing based on user usage. With the development of cloud computing, many traditional IT vendors will gradually change from pure product and solution vendors to cloud computing service providers. Personalized Requirements will continue the traditional information technology application methods. However, for popular and more common information services, the demand will be quickly transformed to a new service model.

The business model of the traditional software industry is to sell software licenses, and then users can buy the software right at one time. In this way, users not only need to buy their own software, but also need to purchase a supporting hardware environment, and need dedicated personnel for management and maintenance. In addition, when the software has a new version, it needs to be upgraded regularly. This business method of software will gradually end with the arrival of cloud computing. In the new way, you no longer need to buy any software or hardware. You only need to pay for the amount you use, and you can use the services you need on the Internet at any time. Software Vendors deploy their applications on a unified cloud computing platform, changing the traditional way of selling software licenses to become software service providers. Obviously, this method is also more conducive to software vendors to protect their intellectual property rights. For end users, this new approach removes the cost of upgrading and maintaining server hardware, network security equipment, and software.

We will gradually see the impact of cloud computing on software, hardware, services, and other fields. The emergence of cloud computing methods changes in various fields, such as servers, personal computers, consulting services, software development, network hardware, and even telecom operations. Public cloud services can also be seen as a form of IT outsourcing to some extent. Therefore, traditional IT outsourcing businesses will also be impacted by cloud computing. Some IT industry work types will also be affected (such as general system administrators), of course, cloud computing will also create some new jobs. The impact of cloud computing on the IT industry is so huge and far-reaching. Therefore, the development of public information technology based on cloud computing will surely surpass it itself, it may even reshape the economy and society.