Every few years, a technological innovation emerges that permanently changes the entire landscape and ecosystem around it. If we go back in time, the 1970s and 1980s were the time of mainframes. These mainframes were massive, often occupying large rooms, and were solely responsible for almost all computing work. Since the technology was difficult to procure and time-consuming to use, many enterprises used to place orders for mainframes one month in advance before they could have an operational mainframe set up.

Then, the early 1990s witnessed a boom in demand for personal computing and the internet. As a result, computers became much smaller in size and comparatively easy to procure for the general public. Consistent innovations on the personal computing and internet fronts eventually changed the entire computer industry. Many people had desktop computers that were capable of running multiple programs and connecting to the internet. The rise of the internet also propagated the rise of client-server deployments. Now there could be centralized servers hosting applications, and services could be reached by anyone who had a connection to the internet anywhere on the globe. This was also a time when server technology gained prominence; Windows NT was released during this time and was soon followed by Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 at the turn of the century.

The most remarkable innovation of the 2000s was the rise and adoption of portable devices, especially smartphones, and with these came a plethora of apps. Apps could connect to centralized servers on the internet and carry out business as usual. Users were no longer dependent on browsers to do this work; all servers were either self-hosted or hosted using a service provider, such as an internet service provider (ISP).

Users did not have much control over their servers. Multiple customers and their deployments were part of the same server, even without customers knowing about it.

However, something else happened in the middle and latter parts of the first decade of the 2000s. This was the rise of cloud computing, and it again rewrote the entire landscape of the IT industry. Initially, adoption was slow, and people approached it with caution, either because the cloud was in its infancy and still had to mature, or because people had various negative notions about what it was.

To gain a better understanding of the disruptive technology, we will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Cloud computing
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and Software as a service (SaaS)
• Understanding Azure
• Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
• Virtualization, containers, and Docker
• Interacting with the intelligent cloud