After talking about Linux, we need to talk about running many computers, not just one. I have spent most of my professional career dealing with IaaS products. In August of 2006, Amazon launched EC2, which is a virtual machines (VMs) as a service product. This was a change from what most people were used to, as most companies had servers running in data centers and had to buy physical hardware to run their product. Now, with a click of a button, you could get servers running and make them do whatever you wanted.
This was the beginning of the cloud and the basic features Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered became common for many future IaaS to offer. Often, these pieces are considered the building blocks for most services. For example, you can often build most cloud products by adding orchestration on top of these basic cloud products: VMs, load balancers (LB), and storage.
The second half of the 2000s were the beginning of boom time for services. Along with IaaS, there were...