Let’s start at the beginning with an overview of cloud computing. The cloud is a hot topic these days, but what exactly is it? The US National Institute of Standards and Technology created the term cloud computing, although there is nothing US-specific about it. Cloud computing is a way of using information technology (IT) that has these five equally important traits First, customers get computing resources that are on-demand and self-service. Through a web interface, users get the processing power, storage, and network they need with no need for human intervention. Second, customers get access to those resources over the internet, from anywhere they have a connection. Third, the cloud provider has a big pool of those resources and allocates them to users out of that pool. That allows the provider to buy in bulk and pass the savings on to the customers. Customers don't have to know or care about the exact physical location of those resources. Fourth, the resources are elastic–which means they’re flexible, so customers can be. If they need more resources they can get more, and quickly. If they need less, they can scale back. And finally, customers pay only for what they use, or reserve as they go. If they stop using resources, they stop paying. That's it. That's the definition of cloud. But why is the cloud model so compelling now? To understand why, we need to look at some history. The trend towards cloud computing started with a first wave known as colocation Colocation gave users the financial efficiency of renting physical space, instead of investing in data center real estate. Virtualized data centers of today, which is the second wave, share similarities with the private data centers and colocation facilities of decades past. The components of virtualized data centers match the physical building blocks of hosted computing—servers, CPUs, disks, load balancers, and so on—but now they’re virtual devices. With virtualization, enterprises still maintain the infrastructure; but it also remains a user-controlled and user-configured environment. Several years ago, Google realized that its business couldn’t move fast enough within the confines of the virtualization model. So Google switched to a container-based architecture—a fully automated, elastic third-wave cloud that consists of a combination of automated services and scalable data. Services automatically provision and configure the infrastructure used to run applications. Today, Google Cloud makes this third-wave cloud available to Google customers. Google believes that, in the future, every company—regardless of size or industry— will differentiate itself from its competitors through technology. Increasingly, that technology will be in the form of software. Great software is based on high-quality data. This means that every company is, or will eventually become, a data company.
