[TECH] Cloud Computing & Big Data

Cloud Computing provides on-demand access to computing resources (servers, storage, AI) via the internet, transforming IT from capital expenditure to utility service.

Overview

Amazon Web Services (2006) launched the modern cloud market; Microsoft Azure (2010) and Google Cloud (2011) followed. Cloud computing enables startups to build global services with zero upfront infrastructure cost. Big Data platforms (Hadoop 2006, Spark 2009) allow analysis of datasets too large for single machines. By 2023, >60% of enterprise IT workloads run in the cloud. The cloud is now the primary substrate for AI training — GPT-4 required ~10²³ FLOP of compute, possible only in large-scale data centres.

Key Actors

• Companies: Amazon (AWS, 2006), Microsoft (Azure, 2010), Google (GCP, 2011), Alibaba Cloud (2009), Salesforce, Snowflake
• Inventors: Andy Jassy (AWS architect), Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)

Key Patents

Wide patent portfolio; Amazon's elastic compute cloud (US Patent 7,865,614, 2011) is foundational.

Economic Value

Global cloud computing market: USD 600 billion/year (2023, Gartner). Projected to reach USD 2T by 2030. Value created by cloud-enabled businesses (Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, etc.): USD 10T+ in market capitalisation.

Notes

Gartner Cloud End-User Spending Forecast 2023. The cloud market is growing at ~22%/year CAGR.

What This Enables

• [TECH] AI & Large Language Models — GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini are trained on clusters of thousands of GPUs in cloud data centres.

Discovery Character

Surprise level: High — That cloud computing would displace most enterprise IT infrastructure within 15 years of AWS's launch (2006) — and create a USD 600B market — was not anticipated by the IT industry. Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison called cloud "complete gibberish" in 2008.

Mode: Systematic business-model innovation. AWS was built to solve Amazon's own infrastructure scaling problems; the insight that spare capacity could be sold as a utility was a business model innovation, not a technical breakthrough. The underlying technologies (virtualisation, distributed systems) were known. The disruption was systematic productisation and pricing innovation.