Every few years, there are technological innovations that change the entire landscape and ecosystem around them. If we go back in time, the 70s and 80s were the time of mainframes. They were huge, occupying large rooms, and almost all computing work was carried out by them. It was difficult to procure one and it was also time-consuming. Enterprises used to order months in advance, before they could have an operational mainframe set up.
The first part of the 90s was the era of personal computing and the internet. Computers became much smaller in size and were comparatively easier to procure. Continuous innovation on the personal computing and internet fronts changed the entire computer industry. People had a desktop through which they could run multiple programs and could connect to the internet. The rise of the internet also propagated the rise of client-server deployments. Now, there could be centralized servers hosting applications and services that could be reached by anyone who had a connection to the internet anywhere on the globe. This was also when server technology gained a lot of prominence. Windows NT was released during this time and was followed by Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 at the turn of the century.
The most remarkable innovation of the 2000s was the rise and adoption of portable devices, especially smartphones, and with them came a plethora of apps. Apps could connect to centralized servers on the internet and could carry out business as normal. Users were no longer dependent on browsers to make this work. All servers were typically either self-hosted or hosted with a service provider, such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Users did not have much control over their servers. Multiple customers and their deployments were part of the same server, even without customers knowing about it.
However, there was something else happening toward the middle and later parts of the first decade of the 2000s. This was the rise of cloud computing, and it again rewrote the entire landscape of the IT industry. Initially, adoption was slow and people approached it with caution, either because the cloud was in its infancy and yet had to mature, or because people had various negative notions about what it was.
We will cover the following topics in the chapter:
- Cloud computing
- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
- Understanding Azure
- Azure Resource Manager
- Virtualization, Containers, and Docker
- Interacting with the intelligent cloud
