{"id":7354,"date":"2011-02-09T06:40:12","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T11:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudtweaks.com\/?p=7354"},"modified":"2023-10-21T06:05:10","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T10:05:10","slug":"a-history-of-cloud-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/2011\/02\/a-history-of-cloud-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Cloud Computing"},"content":{"rendered":"

History of Cloud Computing<\/strong><\/h1>\n

What is cloud computing?<\/a> History, especially if it deals with victories and defeats, is inherently flawed. No one knew this better than Winston Churchill, who was assured of his place in the historical tomes by his victory in WWII. As he put it, \u201cHistory <\/em>will be kind to me for I intend to write it<\/em>\u201d. Therefore, are we taking a leap of faith by trying to encapsulate the history of cloud computing technology in mere words? Is it a wasted effort?<\/p>\n

Not really. In our opinion, the best time to trace the growth of any paradigm, whether technology or culture or any other human endeavor, is when it has grown out of infancy but not attained maturity. For it is then that prejudices will not be able to color our opinions, whether positive or negative.<\/p>\n

\"Fog<\/p>\n

Since cloud computing is gaining acceptability by the day, it is no longer a beginner in the IT infrastructure space. Again, since there are many who resist the technology citing several concerns like security and availability, it hasn\u2019t matured either. In other words, there\u2019s no time like the present in presenting its history.<\/p>\n

The general idea behind the technology dates back to the 1960s, when John McCarthy wrote that \u201ccomputation may someday be organized as a public utility<\/em>.\u201d Then, grid computing, a concept that originated in the early 1990s as an idea for making computer power as easy to access as an electric power grid also contributed to cloud computing. For a detailed look at the differences between utility, grid and cloud computing, look at \u201cCloud Computing vs <\/em>Utility Computing vs Grid<\/em><\/a> Computing: Sorting The Differences.\u201d<\/p>\n

The term \u201ccloud computing\u201d was most probably derived from the diagrams of clouds used to represent the Internet in textbooks. The concept was derived from telecommunications companies who made a radical shift from point-to-point data circuits to Virtual Private Network<\/a> (VPN) services in the 1990s. By optimizing resource utilization through load balancing, they could get their work done more efficiently and inexpensively. The first time the term was used in its current context was in a 1997 lecture by Ramnath Chellappa where he defined it as a new \u201ccomputing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the first movers in cloud computing was Salesforce.com, which in 1999 introduced the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. Amazon was next on the bandwagon, launching Amazon Web Service in 2002. Then came Google Docs in 2006 which really brought cloud computing to the forefront of public consciousness. 2006 also saw the introduction of Amazon\u2019s Elastic Compute cloud (EC2) as a commercial web service that allowed small companies and individuals to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications.<\/p>\n

This was soon followed by an industry-wide collaboration in 2007 between Google, IBM and a number of universities across the United States. Next came Eucalyptus in 2008, the first open source AWS API compatible platform for deploying private clouds, followed by OpenNebula, the first open source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds.<\/p>\n

2009 saw Microsoft\u2019s <\/a>entry into cloud computing with the launch of Windows Azure in November. Now, suddenly, there were major players jumping on to cloud computing from left, right and center.<\/p>\n

While 2010 saw the maximum number of companies entering this space, 2011 is expected to be even more eventful.<\/span><\/p>\n

By Sourya Biswas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History of Cloud Computing What is cloud computing? History, especially if it deals with victories and defeats, is inherently flawed. No one knew this better than Winston Churchill, who was assured of his place in the historical tomes by his victory in WWII. As he put it, \u201cHistory will be kind to me for I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":526,"featured_media":29864,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_breakdance_hide_in_design_set":false,"_breakdance_tags":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,5],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudtweaks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}