image source : Google
Around this time a year ago, I went to a meetup where a long-time friend of mine who was in my city was speaking. He is a start-up founder and had a talk to give. After his talk, we got talking and he was excited to tell me about this idea.
It was about a software platform that would abstract the complex processes involved in deploying applications to AWS, GCP, Azure etc. He had predicted that I would be excited to hear about it as he knew about my love for tech and software. I had introduced him to Python four years before when he wanted to get started in programming. Sure enough, I was very excited and that began my foray into the cloud space. I joined as a founding software engineer and helped build the platform.
As a bit of a background, the internet is made possible because there are computers(servers) that are inter-networked with each other. These servers are what is referred to as the “cloud”. As the world advances and more devices get connected to the internet ( IoT etc), it means that more devices will be hosted on the cloud. The reason why you are able to control your room lights from your office is that the devices are able to communicate with each other over the internet (cloud).
I strongly believe that the future would be primarily cloud-based. Whether it is Web3, the metaverse, chip implants etc, they all would need that layer of communication between them which is the cloud. I would quote a statement made by the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) few months ago in an interview with CNBC;
_“It’s possible that AWS could become the largest business at Amazon. Now, Amazon has other large and great businesses, and so it could take a while for us to get there,” _
“Essentially, IT is going to move to the cloud. And it’s going to take a while. You’ve seen maybe only, call it 10% of IT today move. So it’s still day 1. It’s still early. … Most of it’s still yet to come”
Didn’t that give you chills?? 🥶
For context, Amazon is worth $1.301Trillion. AWS (Amazon’s cloud department) growing to the the largest business speaks a lot about the future of the cloud. The best part is that like he said, it is still early. Everything we see today may seem like much, but in a future where everything would be done on the cloud, this is still day 1.
The best part is that like he said, it is still early. Everything we see today may seem like much, but in a future where everything would be done on the cloud, this is still day 1.
Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud infrastructure provider, but the market for cloud hosting is so big that there are others and each is thriving; Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Digital Ocean, Heroku etc.
Coming to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings we have Render, Railway, Vercel, Netlify to name a few. There are also those that abstract complex processes on the cloud infrastructure providers such as Pipeops, Zeet, Porter, Qovery, Setops, Flightcontrol etc. It is a testament to just how big the market is and it would still multiply exponentially.
I believe that in the long run, we would begin to see more and more acquisitions. As seen when Digital Ocean acquired Cloudways (a PHP-focused PaaS) for USD325M. The market slice for these companies would be down to factors such as ease of use, specificity (for example, the ability to deploy IPFS https://zeet.co/ipfs-landing), etc.
Indeed, the future of the cloud is massive. It is exciting when I think about it and I am so passionate about exploring the cloud space.
Brethren, It is day 0 🏔️.