What is Moore's Law?
It is the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. This simply meant that the processor speeds or overall processing power for computers will double every two years. This law, though an observation initially still holds true 50 years down the line. Emergence of cloud computing is a testimonial to it.
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a type of computing that relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The word "cloud" is used as a metaphor for the internet where different services such as servers, storage and applications are delivered to an organization through the internet.
Real world examples of Benefits of Cloud computing
Lionsgate, a media and entertainment company faced IT challenges of ever expanding infrastructure and costs, increasing enterprise application workloads and tighter time to market requirements. These challenges led to an exploration of cloud based solutions to reduce costs, increase flexibility and increase operational efficiency. To address their problems, the company decided to enlist Amazon Web Services products such as Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3) for storage, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) for storage and Amazon Elastic Block Store(Amazon EBS) for Amazon EC2 storage. After shifting to AWS, Lionsgate was able to reduce the time required to deploy infrastructure from weeks to days or in some cases even hours. The quicker turnaround enabled their business to be more agile and more responsive to what is going on the marketplace. The company avoided acquiring additional data center space saving an estimated $1M+ over three years. AWS has provided a flexible means of securely extending their Datacenter to the cloud via their virtual private cloud (VPC) offering.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is the premier NASA center for the robotic exploration of space. In 2011, NASA launched Curiosity on a 8 month voyage to Mars. NASA wanted to share Curiosity's landing live to millions of people on Earth through its website mars.jpl.nasa.gov. The challenge involved here was to ensure availability, scalability and performance of the website due to concurrent visitors streaming live video. NASA/JPL did not have this huge video streaming infrastructure, hence it leveraged AWS cloud to successfully deliver this engaging experience of Mars to the public. NASA/JPL served from AWS regions around the world. It used Amazon Route 53 and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to balance load across all AWS regions. It used a combination of Adobe Flash Player and EC2 instances running nginx caching tier for the video architecture. Amazon CloudFront was used for content delivery and Amazon CloudFormation automated the deployment of live video streaming infrastructure stacks across multiple AWS availability zones. Using AWS allowed NASA/JPL to construct a robust, scalable web infrastructure in only two to three weeks instead of months and broadcasting the video without building the infrastructure themselves. Moreover, Curiosity continues to use AWS to automate the analysis of images from Mars, also increaing the amount of exploration Mars Science Laboratory can perform on any given sol(Martian day).
References
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
http://www.webopedia.com/
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