Cloud computing-programmers back to the age of personal heroes

Once upon a time, those familiar with the name of the program hero gradually away from us. With the advent of Windows and the Internet era, the strength of the individual has become increasingly small. Just as we were beginning to believe that the era of singles was gone, cloud computing was born. Its powerful computing power, storage capabilities, and simple and efficient programming interfaces make it easy for a programmer to manipulate thousands of computers without having to worry about too much detail. The age of cloud computing seems to make us feel the personal hero of our time.

The decline of the program hero era

WPS authors Seek Baijun, KV anti-virus software author Wangjiangmin, five font author Yongmin, Chinese star author Zhidong, uddos author Bao and Jianjing, ccdos author Wu Xiaojun, natural code author Zhou Zhinong, cced author Zhu Chongjun ... Each name represents a miracle!

Three years old because of polio and a lifelong disability, 38-year-old only contact computer Wangjiangmin, in 1996 with his self-taught written KV6 antivirus software came to Zhongguancun, a week earned 1.5 million. A year later, the KV antivirus software occupies more than 40% of the general software market share. Overnight, Wangjiangmin became the most admired software hero in Zhongguancun--The story of the program heroes, once how brilliant!

However, as the internet has swept through, the program heroes have begun to hide behind the scenes. Although part of the successful transformation of the program hero, Bao and Jianjing founder of the joint public, Zhidong founded Sina, Lei founded excellence ... But everyone knows that they are founders, managers, and no longer the author of the Agency on the cover of their site. Since then, few people have been able to equate to a well-known software, except for some small software, some of which are successful, such as Netants.

The increasingly heavy winux era

As it transitions from the DOS era to the Windows age, software systems are becoming more complex, and program development becomes software engineering. Software In addition to the development process, there are operating processes, maintenance process. First of all, we need to analyze the problem, form the software Requirement specification, then analyze the requirement and generate the function specification. Then, the outline design and detailed design are done. The implementation activity then converts the design results into executable program code. The Division of software Development is more and more fine, some people do database access layer, some people do business logic layer, some people do user interface layer, the whole process of software development, there are constantly confirmed activities to ensure that the final product to meet the requirements of users, software deployment, there are maintenance activities, including the use of the process of expansion, modification and improvement. Along with the above process, there are management process, support process, training process and so on.

Not only the software development and the operation dimension process is more and more complex, the software scale is also bigger and larger. We can tell by the number of lines of Windows code: Windows 95 is 15 million rows, Windows 98 is 18 million, Windows 2000 is 20 million, Windows XP is 35 million, and windows Vista is up to 50 million lines. While Bill Gates often misses a dozens of KB basic language in public, Windows is inevitably becoming bloated.

Due to the spread of the Andy-Bill theorem, Bill is going to take away from Intel CEO Andy (What Andy gives, Bill takes Moz). The public then doubted whether Microsoft intended it. I don't think so. Take a look at Linux that is simple and beautiful. The number of code lines for each version of Linux is shown in Figure 1. As you can see, Linux is growing larger. At this point, Windows and Linux are kind of like it, it might as well be called winux, just like the wintel of the year.

Figure 1 Linux versions of the source lines

Because of the large amount of code, software is increasingly unlikely to be accomplished by individual power alone. For example, the Windows 2000 development team has 900 developers and is equipped with 1800 testers. At the same time, because the software system is extremely huge, the possibility of various bugs increases greatly, which brings great challenge to the maintenance work. For example, Windows XP has so far made thousands of patches. Every patch requires a lot of manpower. So, in the Winux era, the personal hero of the software industry is very difficult to appear.

Cloud computing era program hero reappearance

August 2006, just graduated from the University of Stevie @ Crifton, found that people have to turn photos into Flash video needs, so set up a few servers, founded a small company called Animoto. At that time, the Animoto site had only 5,000 visitors a day. However, in April 2008, Facebook enthusiastically recommended Animoto to its community, making it possible for 750,000 people to register on Animoto sites in just 3 days. Animoto Web site immediately overwhelmed, become slow as snail, bad comment overwhelming. To turn the tide, we must increase the capacity of more than 100 times times. This is a disaster for young people who have neither capital nor capacity to increase technology. At this critical juncture, Stevie's college students suggest using the computing resources offered by Amazon to hire services. Since then, Animoto no longer needs to buy any new equipment, how much traffic, how much Amazon's computing power. How much, how much to pay, not only save the cost, but also to obtain unlimited expansion of the computing power. Now these young people have made a lot of money.

Amazon provides this computing resource leasing service called cloud computing. Amazon has developed flexible computing cloud EC2 and simple storage services S3 provide computing and storage services to businesses. In less than two years of birth, 440,000 programmers are registering on Amazon and developing a wide variety of applications.

In addition to Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo and other large companies have built cloud computing platform. Many successful companies in cloud computing include VMware, Salesforce, Facebook and YouTube. Google's search engine is built on a cloud-computing platform that is distributed across more than 1 million servers in more than 200 sites. Google's successful apps, including Google Earth, Maps, Gmail, Docs, wave, and so on, also use these infrastructures. Google also provides Google App engine programming environment for programmers to develop applications. Microsoft launched its Windows Azure operating system in October 2008. Azure is another disruptive transformation of Microsoft after Windows replaces DOS. The bottom of Azure is Microsoft's Global infrastructure service system, made up of fourth generation data centers around the world. At present, Microsoft has configured more than 200 container-type data centers, the number of servers more than 500,000 units. Microsoft's latest visual Studio 2010 support makes it easy to develop cloud computing applications.

We used to use "a cloud" instead of a network when we drew a network diagram. Now, cloud computing is called "cloud" because its computing facilities are not local and on the web. Cloud computing is the inevitable result of the development of network broadband, it is a business computing model, the computing task distributed in a large number of computer resources pool, so that users can obtain computing power, storage space and information services on demand. The core of cloud computing is a pool of virtual computing resources that can be self-sustaining and managed, typically composed of a number of large server clusters.

With the cloud computing platform, programmers can dynamically request the resources needed to support the operation of a variety of applications without having to worry about trivial details. Cloud computing enables programmers to focus more on their business, helping to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and achieve technological innovation. This we can infer from a set of indirect data. ITunes, Facebook, and MySpace are common platforms that support two of development in a specific application area. By the financial turmoil of 2009 years ago, the number of programmers who developed applications was significantly reduced, and the number of applications increased dramatically (as shown in Figure 2). The reason for this is that with the support platform such as Facebook, programmers need to consider a much simpler and more productive work.

Figure 2 Application growth for ITunes, Facebook, and MySpace

Relying on Amazon's cloud computing platform, many companies without computing resources have succeeded. For example, 99designs is a large-scale design trading platform, has received more than 53,000 designers to provide more than 3 million pieces of design; Livemocha is an online language learning site that offers more than 25 languages and has more than 3 million users Monografias is a Latin American data-sharing website with 2 million visitors a day, and the renowned Internet ranking site Alexa stores more than 12 million data objects on Amazon's cloud computing platform, providing more than 5 million queries a day.

In our country, cloud computing has already set off the IT enterprise transformation upsurge. China Telecom, in collaboration with EMC, built a cloud storage platform in Shanghai with 2PB storage space called E Cloud. E Cloud is a secure online backup service that protects data from disasters such as file corruption, accidental deletion, hardware problems, and so on. However, the built cloud computing data center is essentially in the form of a private cloud, and the outside world cannot access its services. At present, for domestic programmers, either use foreign currency credit card to buy cloud computing services abroad, or wait a short time to use cloud computing services. The use of foreign cloud computing services, in addition to the difficulties of payment, there is a network access speed barrier-unless your site is mainly foreign-oriented. It can be foreseen that the domestic cloud computing platform provider will be mainly Chinese mobile, China Telecom and the three operators. At present, China Mobile has built 1000 servers, 5,000 CPU cores, 3000TB storage scale "big cloud" test platform. May 21, 2010, China Mobile in the second China Cloud Computing conference released a "Big Cloud" version 1.0, has achieved distributed file system, distributed mass Data Warehouse, distributed computing framework, cluster management, cloud storage System, flexible computing systems, parallel data mining tools and other key functions. China Mobile has issued a number of trial accounts and is believed to be open for public use soon.

Due to the application of many new technologies and the scale effect, the performance price of cloud computing compared to the traditional computing model can be dramatically increased by 5-40 times. At present, many enterprises began to layout cloud computing, Baidu, Alibaba, Rising, Microsoft, cloud Technology, quanta computer, bird and other companies are in the large-scale recruitment of cloud computing research and development talent. Quanta computer unexpectedly recruit 700 cloud computing talent. There are so few people who really have access to cloud computing, so many jobs are on the job. For programmers, if the transition to cloud computing, is a great opportunity to enhance their own gold.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)