Introduction to Cloud as Infrastructure: The effects of the new business of computing on practice

Why is there a rush to AI? What is the role of cloud computing in the multi-trillion dollar valuation of tech companies? Are mobile phones really personal devices? How has the way software is produced today changed the theory and practice of computing? And, what are the implications of the technical breakthroughs pushed by big tech companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft AND NVIDIA) for our societies? These are some of the questions we will ask during this course.

The thesis of this course is that contemporary computational infrastructures (CI [0]) present an environment for software production that has become a key driver of political and economic developments globally. With computational infrastructures we refer to cloud + mobile devices as their accessories and by software production, we refer to the creation of economic value through the engineering of software based services. In this course, we will study how CI, developed and controlled by a handful of corporations in the business of computing, is vying to become the default environment for a movement that will transform relationships of production across the globe.

To do so, we will start with the history of the business of computing demonstrated through shifts in software (and hardware) production. In each shift, we will learn about the major political, economic and social forces that brought the business of computing into being. To demonstrate the force that our current CI have become, throughout the course we will follow how digital policy on privacy and data protection attempts to, but falls short of, responding to the societal impact of computational infrastructures. Towards the end, we will also touch on current turns to "strategic autonomy" [1] in European industrial policy, as well as calls for a European sovereign cloud [2] and how these projects are challenged by the massive power computational infrastructures have not only over software production, but economic production as a whole. By the end of the class, you will be equipped to discuss whether replicating the cloud model in Europe -- or elsewhere-- is feasible and desirable, based on an understanding of the historical and economic underpinnings of current day computational infrastructures.

Overall, the course will give you insights into how our current computational infrastructures came to be, concrete examples to demostrate how they serve as a powerful environment for software production, and knowledge that will allow you to better analyze where their future political, economic and technical challenges may lie.

[0] A mainframe, server rack, or even a personal computer can serve as any entity's computational infrastructure. In this course, however, we will use the term CI to refer to the current corporate form of materially organizing computing for the development and global delivery of digital services, for example in the public clouds of AWS by Amazon, Azure by Microsoft, AND on mobile devices, for example, offered by Apple or Google. Using popular terms, CI is cloud infrastructures plus end- or mobile devices as their accessories. To be even more precise, our cloud focus is on players that provide infrastructure at global scale with advanced PaaS and SaaS integration, putting IaaS offerings, like OVHCloud or Hetzner out of our main scope.

[1] Strategic autonomy: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-industrial-strategy_en

Strategic dependency: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-industrial-stra

[2] For different visions, see: https://www.euro-stack.info/ and https://euro-stack.eu/ For European cloud providers aiming to become an alternative, see: https://european-alternatives.eu/ For past attempts, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia-X