Literature review about the cloud. In this lesson, you will learn about how academia views the cloud. Coursera started in 2012 as a project created by two Stanford University Computer Science professors: Andrew Ng pictured here, and Daphne Koller. According to its March 2021 IPO filing, Cousera's revenue increased 59% from 2019 to 2020. That growth is possible because Coursera is a customer of AWS, and AWS handles its petabyte-scale traffic, delivering thousands of courses to tens of millions of learners around the world. To honor Coursera's heritage and to give you a global understanding of how the cloud affects the world, we've included a literature review section to review how academia looks at the contribution of cloud computing and the broader economy. Many cloud providers started in the United States, so let's first ask, how did the cloud change the United States? According to Christopher Hooton at the George Washington University, where I was top 10% of faculty, the cloud is, quote, "merging previously disparate markets for data, phone, voice, and media." Hooten estimates that the cloud added $200 billion and 2 million jobs to the US gross domestic product in 2017. The effect is similar in Europe, where McWilliams found that the cloud generated 763 billion Euros and 2.5 million jobs between 2010 and 2015. Even better, this type of growth is additive. Rather than siphoning off growth from elsewhere in the overall economy, experts here are finding that existing companies are growing more and new businesses are growing faster. The European Commission commissioned a study that concluded more cloud technology adoption could grow the European Union's GDP by 500 billion Euros in five years. In the United States, Swanson and Mendel estimate that the cloud at its current rate will create another $2 trillion in the United States' GDP in the next ten years. Return on investment is a measure of whether something is worth doing. Many organizations are wise to ask, "What is the ROI of migrating my on-premises workloads to the cloud? Is it worth the cost of learning how the cloud works and hiring people knowledgeable about the cloud?" Alfred and Morton found the US government became 300% more efficient by shifting its information and communications technology systems from on-premises to the cloud. Deloitte found that businesses receive similar benefits, collecting an average $2.50 for every $1 they spent on the cloud, a 250% return on investment. In the best cases, they received $10 for every $1 spent, a 1,000% return on investment. Think about this personally, where can you spend $1 and receive $2, $3, or $10 back? One major reason for these very high rates of return is due to the cloud's pay-as-you-go model, which allows governments and businesses to spend for only the cloud that they need and not for this on-premises IT equipment that they would purchase in big-dollar transactions and be stuck with. Instead, these organizations are able to dedicate the money freed up there to activities that are more aligned with their business purpose. What about the cloud's effect on developing countries? Mohammad Yamin, A professor in King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia concluded after reviewing the effect of cloud computing on his country, that quote, "Cloud computing will significantly change the landscape of the affordability of computing power and infrastructure in third world countries. The countries that resist this change are likely to lag behind in their IT and services delivery, and will incur greater costs in catching up at a later stage." So if the cloud provides these economic benefits in developed and developing countries alike, and has such a high return on investment, you might be asking, "What's the catch?" If you move your IT hardware off premises, can the extra distance make it slower for users within your organization? And while that is certainly possible in individual cases, this question was the subject of a paper by Gyorodi et. al., published in the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE. Which found that the speed of cloud operations match those of workloads you run on premises, even taking into account the potentially vast distances between users and data centers. The authors conclude that cloud computing is, quote, "generally the best solution," end quote, even if it is several milliseconds slower. Because the cloud generally wins on other dimensions such as usability, scalability, reliability, security, and price. The final question we'll answer together is, "if the cloud is so good, why have organizations only started using it for 4% or 5% of their workloads in 2021?" After all, the public cloud first became available when AWS launched S3 in 2006. The adoption rate seems rather low 15 years later. And this is what Raza, et. al. studied at Dalhousie University in Halifax. It's because 60% of the existing IT workforce fears the cloud. They think the cloud will make their existing roles redundant. Some members of the existing IT workforce also have a vested interest to keep their workloads off the cloud. And this is a common point of view of my experience because IT workers might have already put several decades of work investing in their on-premises skills. And they simply want to be able to retire without having to learn a number of new skills, and that's okay. But when they retire, they'll have a new generation of workers who are knowledgeable about the cloud. And as Raza notes, many of the IT professionals frightened by the cloud weren't able to explain to him or his team accurately or in any detail why they were afraid of the cloud, or what the cloud actually was. After all, it's human nature to fear the unknown, and it takes dedicated effort like the effort you're putting in right now to learn something new. Raza concludes, quote, "there is a dire need to organize more events so as to educate or enlighten more personnel about cloud computing and the future role of cloud computing. A structure of certification of professionals will bring in a great deal of promotion within this field." AWIT, Nancy, and I agree with Raza's vision and so does AWS, which is why we applaud you for taking this specialization. As a postscript, while researching this section, I came across amazing ways academics use AWS from detecting minute changes in stars thousands of light years away, to using supercomputers to analyze patterns in seismic waves and predict the next earthquake. If you are interested in a specific use of the cloud that we don't cover in this course, I encourage you to look it up at your local library, or on Google Scholar.
