01Overview

In the 1960s time-sharing already imagined computing metered like water and electricity. In 2006 Amazon launched S3 and EC2: a developer with a credit card got storage and virtual machines without buying hardware. Google App Engine, Azure and OpenStack followed.

The core of the cloud is virtualisation plus automation: compute, storage and network become APIs billed by use. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS mark the boundaries of responsibility; containers and Kubernetes moved the unit of delivery from the machine to the application. Today the cloud is also AI infrastructure — GPU clusters, object storage and hosted inference decide whether a model can be trained and served.

02History

  1. 2006

    AWS S3 / EC2

    Public cloud goes commercial.

  2. 2008

    Google App Engine

    An early PaaS.

  3. 2010

    OpenStack

    The open-source cloud platform.

  4. 2013

    Docker

    The container becomes the unit of development and delivery.

  5. 2014

    Kubernetes

    Containers get a de facto orchestrator.

03Core concepts

IaaS / PaaS / SaaS

Layers of service from infrastructure to platform to software.

Elasticity

Scale with load automatically and pay for what you use.

Multi-tenancy

Many customers share one physical plant while staying isolated.

04Hands-on

Do it once — it beats reading it ten times

Deploy the same small service three ways (VM, container, serverless) and compare cold start, cost and control

05Self-check

Say it in your own words first, then open the answer. Whatever you cannot explain is what to review next.

Can you explain "IaaS / PaaS / SaaS"?

Layers of service from infrastructure to platform to software.

Can you explain "Elasticity"?

Scale with load automatically and pay for what you use.

Can you explain "Multi-tenancy"?

Many customers share one physical plant while staying isolated.

What problem did it solve, and why was there nothing better at the time?

Go back to the history section: how was this done before, and what did it cost?

If you had to build it today, how would you break it down?

Use the hands-on task above: write a plan of at most three steps before you start.

06Key people

W

Werner Vogels

1963 –

Amazon CTO and an early driver of cloud computing.

A

Andy Jassy

1968 –

Long-time leader of AWS.

07Further reading

  • CloudonomicsJoe Weinman · 2013
  • AWS Well-Architected FrameworkAWS · 2020