Let's just sort of review first what you know about clouds, and perhaps we can compare experiences. Pretty much everybody nowadays uses a cloud sooner or later, probably multiple times a day, and you do it that without thinking. You use the search algorithms, you're using storage, you are using news notifications. You're probably members of LinkedIn and sort of or using that as a knowledge base. How did this revolution and the way we think and provide computing to people come about? So in our introduction we're going to briefly mention what is driving the move towards the cloud. You see that pretty much all of the industries are now focused on building out their cloud as infrastructure in providing service. And the government similarly following through that pattern, seeing how it can introduce people to digital government by putting government on the Cloud. Same thing always through different services, different applications, tremendous changes. So cloud economics, cloudonomics as it's said, will introduce you this is the next set of lectures, will introduce you to what is driving that and is really sort of because you only use computing occasionally. But then when you do want to use it, you want to use lots of powerful operators, lots of data. That spikyness of the cloud allows you to share the cloud infrastructure between tens of thousands, maybe millions of people. One of the big benefits as we could keep coming back to is, you all are just paying a small amount for a cloud. But it's a huge benefit to you and that system is being shared amongst all sorts of people. But you think really the cloud is working for you, and what it does is take the load off your work station, allows you to use your mobile. It allows you all of the freedom all of the if you like the democracy of being able to see what the data is out there accessing everything in order to make your own decisions. So cloudonomics is really all about how you benefit from having that shared environment. In fact, there are books that describe going back with to the times of electricity and when electricity moved out of just a single generator per house to electric power being provided over the grid, what a radical change that was in the way we used electricity. Similarly, I think you're going to find that power computing makes that same statement for computing. All of a sudden we're sharing, all of a sudden the costs are divided. Everybody can get access to that computer facility, and what is enabling is a different sort of economy. And this is where I think, as we get into the second clause we'll be talking about the small. But just touching up in our big data section, what you're going to see here is we are going to be addressing large amounts of data, doing analytics, providing it very easily in very suitable forms for you to read, to use, to manage. Now the key thing is how do you as computer professionals uses cloud to do data analytics. We'll be mentioning this in the first part and going over how the cloud is built. But in the second part you'll start emphasizing exactly how you can look at data analytics. How you can build your own data analytics from a cloud using all of the tools that have developed. So that really sort of introduces, why I think cloud computing is exciting. It's a revolution, it's a change in the way we do computing. Now in order to provide that revolution to everyone, we are actually looking at changing our organization of computing. And instead of thinking in it perhaps of hardware that's you have to carry around, you bring your laptop and and you put it in your briefcase and move about. What we're going to be thinking about is designing very, very large systems in a way that gives you a very modular design, very easy to change, very easy to access, easy to construct businesses on top of information services. This is called software defined architecture and it's really the key driver for cloud development. What we're looking at now is what are the interfaces? How do you make restful interfaces, HTTP, whatever interfaces that are easy to use, straightforward that can be included in your programs easily that you can generate all sorts of applications. This approach pioneered by companies like Amazon, IBM, Microsoft what it does is to open up worlds that democratizes the world, allows people to access information, build businesses with little over head. Establishing just a completely different way of doing industrialization, commerce, entrepreneurship, and also allowing the citizen access to all that information. As computer professionals, you will want to know what is underlying software defined architecture. What does it mean to have a restful interface? What does it mean to have these layers? What does it mean to have virtualization? So software defined architecture introduces you to these concepts and then we move on from there to the type of styled services we can build on top of software defined architecture. So next, we'll be moving on to talk about infrastructure as a service, and this is a real sort of late development, you might say, but a very fine point to understand. Once you think of computing as a service, you can think of providing CPUs, disk stores, networks, security, huge number of different basic elements as a service. Now you're not buying them, you're renting, you solve them, you can use your own data, you can rent data to use them. All this is coming together, it's almost sort of a complete sort of mixing of all that we know about computing into a set of services from which you can build pretty much anything. Now infrastructure as a service is building from basically operating systems and perhaps even lower, perhaps even down to the metal and building those systems from there upwards. There are other layers and those we will deal with in the next section after infrastructure as a service.
