History of Cloud Computing
5th Oct 2016
The concept of Cloud Computing dates back to 1960 when it was envisioned that computation would someday be organized and provided as a 'public utility'. The term 'cloud' was already in commercial use in the early 1990s and by the arrival of the 21st century, Cloud Computing solutions had appeared on the market.
Some aspects of Cloud Computing differ very little from the old timesharing and thin client models of the 60s, 70s and 80s. As the cost of localized IT infrastructure and individual desktop machines was prohibitive, businesses leveraged technologies that enabled efficiency in business processes in the most cost-effective manner. But with the decreasing price of personal computers during the 1980s and 1990s, the reliance on central systems decreased as more functionality and performance became available on the user's machine itself. Mainframe systems still survived through the use of terminal emulation, but by this time the client-server model became the dominant form of computing architecture being used.
So in some ways, the shift towards Cloud Computing offerings is somewhat a return of the old, as networks have become faster it is again easier to have someone (or somewhere) else do the hard work, leaving the user to focus on the results rather than the technology.
Amazon.com has played a key role in the development of Cloud Computing. The new Cloud architecture was resulting in significant internal efficiency improvements, and so access to their systems through Amazon Web Services on a utility computing basis was provided in 2002. At present, Amazon Web Services currently provide services for:
- Elastic Computing Power
- Content Delivery
- Databases
- E-Commerce
- Messaging
- Monitoring
- Networking and Load Balancing
- Payments and Billing
- Storage
*** For more information on Cloud Computing we recommend you sign up for the Cloud Computing Foundation Course. The Cloud Computing Foundation course is delivered as an on demand online elearning course.