Turbonomic Blog

Introduction

As we enter a new decade, we decided to take a look back at the history of cloud computing and how the space has evolved from the early 2000s to today.

This article is the first part of a blog series. This article will cover the 2000s decade (2000-2009), which marked the emergence of the cloud computing space.

The modern Cloud computing space enabled many of the innovative technologies and solutions we have seen over the last two decades.

Technically, concepts of cloud computing can be traced back to the 1960s - but to me, the origin story of the modern cloud computing can be attributed to Salesforce.com, which was founded in 1999 and later launched one of the first successful public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

As cloud computing gained momentum during the mid-2000s, many organizations struggled to understand what exactly 'Cloud Computing' is. A memorable example is when Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation at the time, shared his thoughts in 2008 on Cloud Computing (a must listen). While Larry Ellison’s provocative comments highlight his lack of understanding of cloud computing at the time, most people were in the same boat and did not fully realize its benefits yet either.

One of the contributors for the confusion was the common practice of ‘Cloudwashing,' where vendors took their legacy software solutions, made them accessible over the internet and marketed them as cloud solutions.

Assuring application performance to enable a seamless customer experience is at the forefront of organizations’ application transformation initiatives. To deliver on customer expectations, organizations are using containers and other cloud native technologies to reap benefits like agility and faster time-to-market – but with that comes complexity and high rates of change on a scale that teams are struggling to manage.

This blog is part of a series in which we share some of the results from our State of Performance in Modern Applications Survey. Want to binge read the results? Download the full report here.

The overwhelming complexity of multicloud has created well-known challenges for organizations as they implement new technologies. Despite these obstacles, the pressure to deliver seamless customer experiences has never been higher. And while assuring application performance is top of mind for all IT and business leaders, organizations don’t have an unlimited budget to do so. Application performance must be managed economically, which is why many organizations are looking to third-party platforms to assist them with managing trade-offs between performance, cost, and compliance.

We all know the headline that will read “automation is taking away jobs”. What we have to see beyond the headline is that it’s a good thing. It doesn’t take long to realize the benefits you can gain if you take a few moments each day and track the repetitive and relatively mundane tasks we do.

Automation is much more than just the mundane and repetitive stuff. The goal of automation is about increasing the flow (and value) of your work. What makes automation successful are five very key features:

This blog is part of a series in which we share some of the results from our State of Performance in Modern Applications Survey. Want to binge read the results? Download the full report here.

The world of IT Operations has been changing in many ways over the past few years. The rise of public cloud created an urgency for traditional operations teams to adapt their own systems and processes to either embrace a public cloud infrastructure, or to create a more cloud-like experience with their internal infrastructure to keep pace.

Public cloud is on a rocket rise in adoption but will not unseat every data center regardless of the rate of adoption. Many data centers are moving towards managed colocation and on-demand providers, mostly because it opens the door for more programmatic approaches to building and managing infrastructure and removes the overhead of managing environment (e.g. power, cooling).

Infrastructure-as-Code, or IaC, has become one of the most dominant features which allows for the accelerated and more consistent management of on-premises or public cloud infrastructure.

This blog is part of a series in which we share some of the results from our 2019 State of Performance in Modern Applications Survey.

If you’re like me, you probably had, or know someone who had a house with a room that nobody was allowed to go into except for “special occasions”. The furniture was often covered in plastic, and the carpet was impeccably clean, vacuumed weekly despite nobody walking on it except the person using the vacuum.

In this series Microservices in the Real World, I’ve been sharing our journey to cloud native. First there was the challenge of automating memory management in our containerized Java application, then we had to secure our containers (thank you, Red Hat), and then we had to figure out how to run an application, which we started building before Kubernetes was a thing, on Kubernetes. Which puts us at “cloud native-ish.” The next question for us was: How do we fully automate our application lifecycle?