Moore’s Law and the Cloud

Gordon Moore, one of the cofounders of Intel, identified a computing trend during the 1960s that remains true today:

The number of transistors which can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.

This observation is known as Moore’s Law. We find that computing power and disk-storage capacity also double at nearly this rate. The result is that a capital investment in computing devices has a very short effective life expectancy. The systems we buy today may be only half as fast as those you will purchase two to three years from now.

By shifting computer resources to the cloud, companies eliminate the need to continually update their own data-center equipment, which may drive a considerable cost savings. Today, within the cloud environment, you can think of the services provided (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) as a commodity.