The origins of cloud computing

The history of cloud computing began almost 70 years ago, when corporations and large organizations began exploring computers and mainframe systems. In the 1950s and 1960s, these were only a reality for organizations with sufficient financial resources. Computers were simply large, expensive interfaces that required human operators to interact with the mainframe computer terminals to process complex data.

These early mainframe clients had limited computing power and needed the bulk of the available physical servers to get the work done. This model of computing is the predecessor of cloud computing.

In the 1970s, hardware-assisted virtualization was first introduced by IBM, which allowed organizations to run many virtual servers on a physical server at a given time. This was a milestone for mainframe owners as they could run virtual machines using the VM’s operating system. Virtualization has come a long way and VM operating systems are a deployment option for many organizations for building and deploying applications. Today’s cloud computing model couldn’t have been possible without the concept of virtualization.

Technically, the concept of virtualization evolved with the internet as businesses started providing virtual private networks as a paid service. This resulted in a great momentum back in the 1990s leading to the development of a foundational block for modern cloud computing.

The term cloud computing specifies where the boundaries of computing follow the economic rationale rather than the technical limits alone.

Virtualization

Virtualization is the process of running a virtual instance by creating an abstraction layer over dedicated amounts of CPU, memory, and storage that are borrowed from a physical host computer.

In the following diagram, each VM runs an operating system (OS) of choice with its own software, libraries, and so on that are needed for its applications. This VM silo runs the hypervisor on top of the bare-metal environment:

Figure 1.2 – Cloud computing

This virtualization technique forms the foundational component of cloud computing, where a hypervisor runs on a real machine and creates virtual operating systems on that particular machine.

In 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), the first cloud provider to offer online services to other websites of customers. In 2007, IBM, Google, and several other interested parties such as Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and the University of California at Berkeley joined forces and developed research projects. Through these projects, they realized that computer experiments can be conducted faster and for cheaper by renting virtual computers rather than using their hardware, programs, and applications. The same year also saw the birth of Netflix’s video streaming service, which uses the cloud and has revolutionized the practice of binge-watching.

Cloud Computing

AWS states that “Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider”.

This completes our introduction to the cloud, the history of cloud computing, and its evolution. In the next section, we will look at the key characteristics of cloud computing so to understand how cloud computing is beneficial for businesses in this new computing era.