Too Long; Didn't Read
Since the birth of the first microprocessor in 1971, demand for computational processing power has <em>exploded</em>. Over the past six decades we’ve seen <a href="https://pages.experts-exchange.com/processing-power-compared" target="_blank">a 1 trillion-fold increase in performance</a>. Recognizing the opportunity, tech giants like Amazon, Salesforce, <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/google" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/microsoft" target="_blank">Microsoft</a>, and Oracle have begun offering cloud computing services to support computational intensive applications and tasks. Cloud services provide on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources via the internet. Users and businesses can pay for the computational resources as needed and can avoid heavily investing in proprietary infrastructure. This is what is referred to as “the cloud” and it’s a massive industry <a href="https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3815165" target="_blank">forecasted to be $411B in 2020</a>.