The history of cloud computing starts way back in the 1960s, when an “intergalactic computer network” was first suggested, and in recent years the technology has served to shake-up both the enterprise IT and supplier landscape.
In 1969, J. C. R. Licklider helped develop the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), a “very” primitive version of the Internet. JCR, or “Lick” was both a psychologist and a computer scientist, and promoted a vision called the “Intergalactic Computer Network,” in which everyone on the planet would be interconnected by way of computers, and able to access information from anywhere. (What could such an unrealistic, impossible-to-pay-for, fantasy of the future look like?) The Intergalactic Computer Network, otherwise known as the Internet, is necessary for access to the Cloud.
The meaning of Virtualization began shifting in the 1970s, and now describes the creation of a virtual machine, that acts like a real computer, with a fully functional operating system. The concept of Virtualization has evolved with the Internet, as businesses began offering “virtual” private networks as a rentable service. The use of virtual computers became popular in the 1990s, leading to the development of the modern Cloud Computing infrastructure.
The Late 1990s
In its early stages, the Cloud was used to express the empty space between the end user and the provider. In 1997, Professor Ramnath Chellapa of Emory University defined Cloud Computing as the new “computing paradigm, where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale, rather than technical limits alone.” This somewhat ponderous description rings true in describing the Cloud’s evolution.
The Early 2000s
In 2002, Amazon introduced its web-based retail services. It was the first major business to think of using only 10% of their capacity (which was commonplace at the time) as a problem to be solved. The Cloud Computing Infrastructure Model gave them the flexibility to use their computer’s capacity much more efficiently. Soon after, other large organizations followed their example.
In 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services, which offers online services to other websites, or clients. One of Amazon Web Services’ sites, called Amazon Mechanical Turk, provides a variety of Cloud-based services including storage, computation and “human intelligence.” Another of Amazon Web Services’ sites is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allowing individuals to rent virtual computers and use their own programs and applications.
In the same year, Google launched the Google Docs services. Google Docs was originally based on two separate products, Google Spreadsheets and Writely. Google purchased Writely, which offers renters the ability to save documents, edit documents, and transfer them into blogging systems. (These documents are compatible with Microsoft Word.) Google Spreadsheets (acquired from 2Web Technologies, in 2005) is an Internet-based program allowing users to develop, update, and edit spreadsheets, and to share the data online. An Ajax-based program is used, which is compatible with Microsoft Excel. The spreadsheets can be saved in an HTML format.
What to Expect
A customer using a Public Cloud service can have three basic expectations. First, customers rent the services, instead of purchasing hardware and software to accomplish the same goal. Second, the vendor is responsible for all the administration, maintenance, capacity planning, backups, and troubleshooting. And finally, for many business projects, it is simply faster and easier to use the Cloud. It comes with huge amounts of storage, the ability to handle multiple projects, and more availability to a variety of users, simultaneously.