Infrastructure 3.0
What is Infrastructure 3.0?
Though the Internet has been around since the 1950s, it gained true prominence and mainstream acceptance from the 1990s onwards. We could easily look at the Evolution of the Internet and its impact to society in general in three lenses.
Infrastructure 1.0: 1990's to early 2000's
The commercial internet or the client-server era that came of age in the late ’90s and early ’00s owes its existence to the x86 instruction set (Intel), the standardized operating system (Microsoft), the relational database (Oracle), Ethernet networking (Cisco), Virtualization (VMware) and networked data storage (NetApp). Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and even the earliest iterations of Google and Facebook were built on this backbone we call Infrastructure 1.0.
Infrastructure 2.0: 2004 to 2015
As the web matured, growing from 16 million users in 1995 to over 3 billion by the end of 2015, the scale and performance requirements of applications morphed. It was no longer feasible, much less economical, for the Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons of the world to run their businesses on the backs of technologies developed during and for the client-server era.
Instead, these companies looked inward. Coupling superior technical expertise with parallel computing research from academia, these new Internet-first organizations defined a new class of infrastructure that was scale-out, programmable, (often) open source, and commodity. This category of technologies — Linux, KVM, Xen, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, and many others — defined the cloud era. These technologies are collectively referred to as Infrastructure 2.0.
Infrastructure 2.0: 2015 to 2018
Ultimately, the Infrastructure 2.0 technologies were purpose-built for scaling the internet to billions of end users and storing information captured from those users efficiently. In doing so, the innovations of Infrastructure 2.0 catalyzed a dramatic acceleration in data growth.
Infrastructure 2.0 was ultimately concerned with the question “How do we connect the world?” Today’s generation of technology rephrases the question to ask, “How do we make sense of the world?”
Now combining with virtually endless parallel compute and algorithmic advances, the stage was set for today’s era’s of disruptive technologies such as Data Science and Analytics, IoT, AI (Deep Learning), Blockchain and Reality technologies (such as VR, AR, MR and XR) make more sense and provide deeper actionable intelligence on business models, processes and customer preferences than ever before. It is these Infrastructure 3.0 technologies which serve as the catalyst for the ongoing mass-disruptive Digital Transformation of all markets, verticals and industries.
