IDG Contributor Network: Serverless computing: How did we get here? (Part 1)
Every once in a while I get asked what my background is, and my answer is always that I'm a generalist: a jack of all trades and master of some. Being a generalist is not easy in a world where IT professionals have been told since the beginning to specialize. However, it requires a generalist to see the forest for the trees, an analogy well-suited to the continually emerging world of cloud computing.
In 2001, I started my journey into the world of cloud computing. With a background in plant-floor automation and embedded systems, my point of view was admittedly skewed with a natural affinity for distributed computing. The hot topic at the time was grid computing, and as I was learning about it, I recognized a model that made sense: CPU scavenging. CPU scavenging virtualizes all the spare CPU cycles wasted on desktops and servers as they wait for something to do (when operating on a scale measured in billionths of a second, it turns out a lot of time is wasted waiting for something to do). However, CPU scavenging was viewed as pedestrian at best, not something a real IT person would use. How could such a model possibly work in the corporate IT world where big iron hidden in humongous data centers, designed like fallout shelters with power backups and oodles of bandwidth, did all the heavy lifting? It seemed a reasonable explanation, but when I tugged on the string and asked why a server was better than a desktop, conversation after conversation came to an abrupt end. I had to push further to better understand.
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