Count the changes brought about by cloud computing

The advent of change is unstoppable. If we relax our horizons and position our current era in the history of technology and economic development, we will be able to understand more clearly the changes and opportunities brought about by cloud computing.

Carlota Perez in his book "The Technological revolution and the financial capital" (Technlolgy Revolutions and Financial captial) combed the history of human society from the 18th century industrial Revolution to today's information age for nearly 250 years, This paper reviews five times of social change dominated by the basic technological revolution, and sums up the cyclic laws of technology induced from germination to rapid development, agitation to bursting, and reconstruction to maturity. At present, we are in the information and communication era, which is led by Lt Technology, experienced the burst of the dot-com bubble, witnessed the outbreak of the financial crisis, "the society's technology and economy is undergoing the reconstruction of order." In this process, although no unreal legends and manic, but the precipitation and evolution of technology will be more and more real, which contains opportunities and wealth will be more and more extensive.

The transformation of the general trend

There is always a rule behind change, and the advent of cloud computing is no exception. It is not random, accidental, but when science and technology and social and economic development to a certain extent inevitable. Here, we can make an analogy between the development of computing technology and the development of social economy (as shown in Figure 1.8), it is not difficult to explore the rules.

In the farming era, every household in the "mining chrysanthemum under the east fence, leisurely see Nanshan" as the life, their own production tools, their own farming harvest, looks 陿 Italy, but only inefficient to meet the limited basis for life needs. With the use of iron tools and the progress of production technology, agricultural labor productivity has been improved, but also make the production of farm tools more diverse and complex, can not be carried out by one family independently. In this context, the human history of the "Second Division of Society", by craftsmen to carry out the production of professional tools, farmers specializing in agricultural activities. With the further improvement of social productivity, the production of tools is becoming more and more standardized and large-scale, the scale of handicraft workshop is more and more large, the capacity of agricultural production is more and more big, and the simple exchange can't accommodate the demand of social economic development. In this context, the businessman appeared, completed the "Third social division of labor." With the continuous refinement of the division of labor, everyone and society as a whole efficiency and efficiency have been improved, human society gradually from the savage to civilization.

Against the development of computing technology in the last hundred years, it is not difficult for us to find the law similar to the social economy. In the early mainframe era, companies or institutions themselves purchased, operated and used computing equipment. With the development of semiconductor, network and software technologies, computing technology has entered the era of personal computer. There are a variety of service providers on the Internet, and new business models are emerging. In this process, providers consolidate their professional status and business size by setting standards. This specialization and scale continues to deepen, along with the mature technology, IT service will gradually become like water and electricity, can be obtained everywhere through the Internet. This is the cloud computing, with the history of the development of the context in our time of birth. Now, just the beginning, with the further fine division of the IT ecosystem, cloud computing will breed a new industrial chain. New participants will join, and the old participants must be camera-changed.

Emerging industrial chains

Cloud computing, as a new IT application model, has brought the LT industry to adjust and upgrade, but also spawned a new industrial chain. The industry chain includes a variety of roles such as hardware vendors, basic software providers, cloud platform providers, cloud service providers, application providers, enterprise users, and individual users.

The role of cloud computing industry structure is shown in Figure 1 9. In the industrial structure of cloud computing, the cloud platform provider is at the center. Cloud platform providers build a public cloud environment for cloud service providers and build private cloud environments for enterprise and institutional users. The cloud platform provider buys hardware and software from both the hardware provider and the underlying software provider to provide the solutions needed to build the cloud environment. Application providers get the resources they need from cloud service providers to develop and operate their own applications, providing services to individual users and enterprise users. In addition to obtaining a private cloud from a cloud platform provider and obtaining readily available software from the application provider, enterprise users can also get computing and storage resources directly from the cloud service provider to run their own applications within the enterprise's organization. It can be seen that the cloud platform providers, cloud service providers and application providers in the middle of the industry chain are engaged in business activities directly related to cloud computing, and we refer to them as cloud computing providers.

(Responsible editor: Schpeppen)