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So How Did Cloud Computing Start Anyway?

By Joseph Walker

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 08Feb2012 Word count: 865 Viewed: 78 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Cloud Computing 101: Where Did the Cloud Come From?

Over the past year or two, cloud computing has definitely grown--certainly in its usage and availability, but also in the phrase's reach and ubiquity. The cloud label is so hot that nearly everyone in the tech world is trying to spin their new product as some sort of cloud initiative.

Many industry observers, as well as common users, confuse the cloud as a new term for the Internet. In reality, that isn't the case at all. The cloud is certainly related to the Internet and couldn't exist without it, but the Internet is much bigger than the cloud.

So then what exactly is the cloud?

Origins of Cloud Computing

No single individual or company can claim complete credit for the invention or conceptualization of cloud computing as it currently exists. As it relates specifically to computing services, IBM was one of the very first big cloud computing players. In 2001, IBM began development on something it called autonomic computing, another name computer systems that can manage themselves based on a set of administrator-defined policies.

At approximatelythe same time, network engineers and architects at a variety of companies were developing standards and strategies for something called rapid elasticity. Now typically referred to as just elastic networks, such an architecture allows networks to easily scale the availability of bandwidth based on network traffic and other demands.

In 2003, IBM began a marketing push for something it coined on-demand computing. On-demand computing enabled clients to outsource aspects of its IT infrastructure to IBM and its data centers. IBM recognized that many companies possed far more computing resources than they typically required because of occasional demand spikes (or sometimes even poor planning). Their on-demand computing service meant companies only had to pay for the amount of computing power they used. To make such a service economical, IBM developed new protocols for virtualization and the effcient allocation of computing resources across their data centers.

HP and Sun paralleled IBM with their own Adaptive Enterprise and N1 strategies. Ultimately, though, it was Amazon In 2006 that introduced what most of us in the industry call the public cloud. Amazon's move came, in large part, due to of an internal analysis that found that Amazon's data centers were only using an average of 10 percent of their capacity.

Amazon's EC2 and then later Microsoft's Windows Azure and Rackspace's public cloud laid the basis for companies to migrate to the cloud. With the popularity of mobile devices and WiFi enabled computers, more and more companies and developers are bringing their products to market within a cloud environment.

Today, the cloud mostly means the set of services and computer resources powered by Internet connected data centers. Hotmail, Facebook, Amazon Instant Video, and just about any web application or game that runs in a browser are all hosted by data centers that meet the definition of cloud computing. Companies like Microsoft, Red Hat, and Apache have also created the server-side software necessary for the virtualization and scalability required for cloud computing.

It's important to note, though, that not everything or application that runs on the Internet deserves the cloud label. Cloud apps do not include software that runs on a single web server (or small group of them clustered together). Not does the cloud include distributed computing services that rely on peer-to-peer computing.

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