The drone circles the 150-foot cell tower, its cameras steadily facing the cell tower as it rises. Its high-definition (HD) video feed captures every inch of the structure, relaying the images to the ground where its crew awaits. Then, as the images begin to arrive, the crew from Aerialtronics transmits those images to IBM's Watson cloud computing service.

There, the images are run through an image recognition application programming interface (API) that's part of IBM Watson's Internet of Things (IoT) platform. IBM Watson has been trained to recognize the components of the cell tower, including the feed lines and the antennas, and to recognize when something is amiss. Only if the drone and IBM Watson (360.00 Per User Per Year for the Plus Edition at Software Advice) find something wrong does it become necessary for a person to climb the cell tower. Otherwise, the cell tower inspection is risk-free.

Considering that cell tower servicing is a very dangerous occupation, using a drone and a machine learning (ML) API saves lives. It also saves money and time. This is the cloud today.





Evolving Relationship Between the Cloud and IT

Even IT professionals who stay on top of current trends mostly continue to think of cloud services as mainly an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) play. That makes sense since these folks are trained to think in terms of available infrastructure and how to allocate that to particular business needs. The cloud is a place where you can offload workloads that you used to run on servers in your data center. By using someone else's servers, you save money and time since the servers are always there, waiting to be provisioned.

And the cloud certainly still does that and does it very well, too. But folks who are truly leveraging what the cloud has to offer need to look for more. These folks are service purchasers looking for more than just a way to run things remotely. They're looking for a place to operate securely and to provide a physical environment that's difficult or impossible to create in your own data center.

"We have a lot of customers moving into the container world," said Prashanth Chandrasekar, Vice President and General Manager of Managed Public Cloud Services at Rackspace. He said that companies are orchestrating their container operations using Kubernetes.

In addition, Chandrasekar said that cloud users are finding an effective home for DevOps use and for setting up and operating a Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipeline as a development method on services such as Amazon Web Services ($6,415.00 at Amazon) (AWS).

Amazon is doing a lot more than replacing infrastructure and supporting developer services with its cloud service porfolio. Like IBM, AWS makes heavy use of ML and artificial intelligence (AI). The company uses AI in its daily operations in such things as the robots in its fulfillment centers to programming its drones to those recommendations you see when you visit Amazon's shopping site. It's also making some of these capabilities available to AWS customers as value-added services.

Lambda and the Edge

Amazon also has a few new cloud features that push the envelope while simultaneously harkening back to the old days of mainframe computing. One of those is a new cloud capability called AWS Lambda, which is what Amazon calls its serverless computing initiative.

The idea behind AWS Lambda is that you can simply run your application on a server that's already in the cloud. You don't have to provision the server, apply patches, or otherwise manage the device, and you only pay for the time your app is running.

If this sounds familiar, then that's because it's an old idea that Amazon's bringing to the cloud. When that idea first appeared, it was called time-share computing. The difference is that the old time-share computing ran on a mainframe, while today, serverless apps run on a large infrastructure of likely clustered and geo-redundant servers, which is undoubtedly far more powerful than the mainframes of the past.

Amazon's focus on edge computing is another blast from the past reimagined for the cloud. In the edge environment, devices are simple, have relatively little storage, and need the cloud to make things work. Today, that's part of the IoT world, and Amazon sees the day coming when billions of IoT devices will need cloud support.

"Cloud platforms have evolved of the past few years," said Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO, of the IBM Cloud Platform. He said that, where once the cloud was for workload migration, now it's being used to modernize and extend the capabilities of those workloads. He said customers want to add new features and capabilities such as AI to their operations, not simply move the same workload to a new computing location. "They're building brand new things," McGee explained, "such as analytics apps using AI."

"One of the big drivers is people wanting to get to Watson," he continued, mentioning the image recognition software used by the cell tower inspection drones. He said that they're also wanting access to apps that let them make use of blockchain.

McGee pointed out that access to cloud services can be critical to some industries, including global shipper Maersk Line, the Denmark-based global logistics giant. Maersk Line uses IBM's public cloud services because the company needs access all of the time, without any outages.

Of course, the cloud as infrastructure is still very important, but today it's more than just a place to run what you'd otherwise run in your data center. The new cloud is being used for jobs that your data center could never do because they require resources that you could never own (unless you were Amazon or IBM).

The Cloud Helps IT Be More Than a Cost Center

While you might think of access to IBM Watson as just more infrastructure, it's far more than that because you're getting much more than just a computer: you're also getting access to new capabilities and the expertise to exploit it. This is what makes it possible to harness all of that power, whether it's on IBM Watson or on the specialized AI at AWS or any other advanced cloud computing resource.

IT pros need to start looking at the cloud as more than simply a new place to run certain apps more cheaply. Most of today's advanced engineering and development efforts are happening in the cloud and what makes it such a revolutionary paradigm is that this innovation is immediately available at cloud scale and cost. That means it's far cheaper and faster for IT to evaluate and implement new capabilities that can make their organizations more efficient and competitive. In other words, using the cloud effectively makes it easier than ever for IT to add bottom line business value.

Further Reading