History of cloud computing

Last updated

The concept of the cloud computing as a platform for distributed computing traces its roots back to 1993. At that time, Apple spin-off General Magic and AT&T utilized the term in the context of their Telescript and Personal Link technologies. [1]

Contents

In an April 1994 feature by Wired , titled "Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II", Andy Hertzfeld elaborated on Telescript, General Magic's distributed programming language. He described the expansive potential of the cloud:

The beauty of Telescript ... is that now, instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out there, where a single program can go and travel to many different sources of information and create a sort of a virtual service. No one had conceived that before. The example Jim White [the designer of Telescript, X.400 and ASN.1] uses now is a date-arranging service where a software agent goes to the flower store and orders flowers and then goes to the ticket shop and gets the tickets for the show, and everything is communicated to both parties. [2]

Early history

In 1963, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded Project MAC, the first computer time-sharing system. [3] During the 1960s, the initial concepts of time-sharing became popularized via Remote Job Entry (RJE); [4] this terminology was mostly associated with large vendors such as IBM and DEC. Full-time-sharing solutions were available by the early 1970s on such platforms as Multics (on GE hardware), Cambridge CTSS, and the earliest UNIX ports (on DEC hardware). Yet, the "data center" model where users submitted jobs to operators to run on IBM mainframes was overwhelmingly predominant.

In the late 1980s, the invention of the world wide web led to internet expansion and on-premises data centers. [5] In the 1990s, telecommunications companies, who previously offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering virtual private network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service, but at a lower cost. By switching traffic as they saw fit to balance server use, they could use overall network bandwidth more effectively. [6] They began to use the cloud symbol to denote the demarcation point between what the provider was responsible for and what users were responsible for. Cloud computing extended this boundary to cover all servers as well as the network infrastructure. [7] As computers became more diffused, scientists and technologists explored ways to make large-scale computing power available to more users through time-sharing. [6] They experimented with algorithms to optimize the infrastructure, platform, and applications, to prioritize tasks to be executed by CPUs, and to increase efficiency for end users. [8] At the same time, Application Service Providers became popular, and later evolved into Software as a Service (SaaS). [9] In 1999, Medidata launches Rave, the first electronic data capture software for clinical data. [10]

The use of the cloud metaphor for virtualized services dates at least to General Magic in 1994, where it was used to describe the universe of "places" that mobile agents in the Telescript environment could go. As described by Andy Hertzfeld:

"The beauty of Telescript," says Andy, "is that now, instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out there, where a single program can go and travel to many different sources of information and create a sort of a virtual service." [11]

The use of the cloud metaphor is credited to General Magic communications employee David Hoffman, based on long-standing use in networking and telecom. In addition to use by General Magic itself, it was also used in promoting AT&T's associated Personal Link Services. [12]

2000s

In 2002, Amazon established its subsidiary Amazon Web Services, which allows developers to build applications independently. [13] [14]

In 2006, Amazon introduced Simple Storage Service (S3) in March and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in August. These services were among the first to use server virtualization to provide IaaS on a pay-as-you-go basis. In the same year, Google launched Google Docs, a SaaS model to edit and save documents online.

In 2007, Netflix launches its online video streaming service, the first SaaS streaming site. [15] Also, IBM and Google partnered with universities-- University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Stanford, University of Maryland, and UC Berkeley-- to create a research server farm. [16] This would later become the Cluster Exploratory program when the National Science Foundation funded the project in early 2008. [17]

In April of 2008, Google released the beta version of Google App Engine, a PaaS that provides a fully managed infrastructure and platform for users to create web applications. [18] [19] In mid-2018, Gartner noted the potential for cloud computing to reshape the relationship between IT service consumers, users, and providers. [20]

NASA's Nebula becomes the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds in early 2009. [21] Later in the same year, The French government announced the Andromède Project to establish a national cloud computing service. The government committed €285 million to the initiative. [22] [23] The initiative ultimately failed, leading to the shutdown of Cloudwatt on 1 February 2020. [24] [25]

2010s

In February 2010, Microsoft launched Microsoft Azure in February, following its announcement in October 2008. [26] Five months later, Rackspace Hosting and NASA initiated an open-source cloud-software project, OpenStack. This project aimed to facilitate organizations in offering cloud-computing services on standard hardware. The early codebase was sourced from NASA's Nebula platform and Rackspace's Cloud Files platform. [27] [28]

In March of 2011, IBM introduced the IBM SmartCloud framework, designed to support the Smarter Planet initiative. [29] Later that year, the US government established the Federal Risk Management Program, FedRAMP, becoming the first government-wide cloud services accreditation program with standardized risk assessment methodologies for cloud products and services. Later on October 12, iCloud was launched, allowing users to store personal information across multiple devices and share with other users. [30]

In June 2012, On June 7, Oracle announced the Oracle Cloud. [31] In May, Google Compute Engine was released in preview and subsequently rolled out into General Availability in December 2013. [32] Also in 2013, Docker launched as a PaaS model to host containers in the cloud for software development. [33]

In December 2019, Amazon launched AWS Outposts, a service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer datacenters, co-location spaces, or on-premises facilities. [34]

2020s

Since the global pandemic of 2020, cloud technology jumped ahead in popularity due to the level of security of data and the flexibility of working options for all employees, notably remote workers. For example, Zoom grew over 160% in 2020 alone. [35] Security and privacy are still a major concern due to security breaches and one of the main focuses of research. CloudChain, a cloud-oriented blockchain system is designed to increase the layers of security. [36]

Currently, global spending on cloud computing services has reached $706 billion and the International Data Corporation predicts it to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. [37]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Db2</span> Relational model database server

Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB/2, then DB2 until 2017 and finally changed to its present form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Web Services</span> On-demand cloud computing company

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Utility computing, or computer utility, is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing, the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs. Utility is the packaging of system resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service. This model has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire computer resources; instead, resources are essentially rented.

Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as on-demand software, web-based software, or web-hosted software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared Internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual private cloud</span> Pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as users hereafter) using the resources. The isolation between one VPC user and all other users of the same cloud (other VPC users as well as other public cloud users) is achieved normally through allocation of a private IP subnet and a virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN or a set of encrypted communication channels) per user. In a VPC, the previously described mechanism, providing isolation within the cloud, is accompanied with a virtual private network (VPN) function (again, allocated per VPC user) that secures, by means of authentication and encryption, the remote access of the organization to its VPC resources. With the introduction of the described isolation levels, an organization using this service is in effect working on a 'virtually private' cloud (that is, as if the cloud infrastructure is not shared with other users), and hence the name VPC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppScale</span> American cloud infrastructure software company

AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, however, its source code remains freely available to the open-source community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Kemp</span> NASA executive

Chris C. Kemp is an American entrepreneur who, along with Dr. Adam London, founded Astra, a space technology firm based in California, in 2016. He served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and as NASA's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for IT. While at NASA, Kemp partnered with Google and Microsoft and helped in the creation of Google Moon and Mars. He worked with the White House to develop the cloud computing strategy for the United States Federal Government and co-founded OpenStack, an open-source software project for cloud computing. He was also one of the founders of Nebula, a company that from 2011 to 2015 worked to commercialize the technology.

Cloudera, Inc. is an American software company providing an enterprise data management and analytics platform. The platform is the only cloud native platform purpose built from the ground up to run on all major public cloud providers as well as on on-premises private cloud environments. It allows users to store and analyze data using hardware and software in cloud-based and data center operations, spanning hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Cloudera offers cloud-native analytics for data distribution, data engineering, data warehousing, transactional data, streaming data, data science, and machine learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStack</span> Cloud computing software

OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud Foundry</span> Open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service

Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization.

A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machine image, or they can purchase access to a database service, maintained by a cloud database provider. Of the databases available on the cloud, some are SQL-based and some use a NoSQL data model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abiquo Enterprise Edition</span>

Abiquo Hybrid Cloud Management Platform is a web-based cloud computing software platform developed by Abiquo. Written entirely in Java, it is used to build, integrate and manage public and private clouds in homogeneous environments. Users can deploy and manage servers, storage system and network and virtual devices. It also supports LDAP integration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP Cloud</span> Set of cloud computing services

HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard that offered public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, managed private cloud and other cloud services. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 until 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nebula (company)</span>

Nebula, Inc. was a hardware and software company with offices in Mountain View, California, and Seattle, Washington, USA. Nebula developed Nebula One, a cloud computing hardware appliance that turned racks of standard servers into a private cloud. The Nebula One private cloud system was built on the OpenStack open source cloud framework, as well as many other open source software projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet area network</span> Type of large-scale computer network

An Internet area network (IAN) is a concept for a communications network that connects voice and data endpoints within a cloud environment over IP, replacing an existing local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN) or the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning, alongside a set of management tools. It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Google Docs, according to Verma, et.al. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.

Cloud computing has become a social phenomenon used by most people every day. As with every important social phenomenon there are issues that limit its widespread adoption. In the present scenario, cloud computing is seen as a fast developing area that can instantly supply extensible services by using internet with the help of hardware and software virtualization. The biggest advantage of cloud computing is flexible lease and release of resources as per the requirement of the user. Other benefits encompass betterment in efficiency, compensating the costs in operations and management. It curtails down the high prices of hardware and software

Cloud-based quantum computing is the invocation of quantum emulators, simulators or processors through the cloud. Increasingly, cloud services are being looked on as the method for providing access to quantum processing. Quantum computers achieve their massive computing power by initiating quantum physics into processing power and when users are allowed access to these quantum-powered computers through the internet it is known as quantum computing within the cloud.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Cloud</span> Cloud computing services provided by IBM

IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.

References

  1. ↑ AT&T (1993). "What Is The Cloud?". YouTube . Archived from the original on 2021-10-27. Retrieved 2017-10-26. You can think of our electronic meeting place as the Cloud. PersonaLink was built from the ground up to give handheld communicators and other devices easy access to a variety of services. [...] Telescript is the revolutionary software technology that makes intelligent assistance possible. Invented by General Magic, AT&T is the first company to harness Telescript, and bring its benefits to people everywhere. [...] Very shortly, anyone with a computer, a personal communicator, or television will be able to use intelligent assistance in the Cloud. And our new meeting place is open, so that anyone, whether individual, entrepreneur, or a multinational company, will be able to offer information, goods, and services.
  2. ↑ Steven Levy (April 1994). "Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II" Archived 2015-10-02 at the Wayback Machine . Wired.
  3. ↑ "Project MAC". Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Retrieved June 28, 2023.
  4. ↑ White, J. E. (1971). "Network Specifications for Remote Job Entry and Remote Job Output Retrieval at UCSB". tools.ietf.org. doi:10.17487/RFC0105. Archived from the original on 2016-03-30. Retrieved 2016-03-21.
  5. ↑ Loaiza Enriquez, Rodolfo (June 25, 2021). "Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) in Azure" (PDF). Metropolia University of Applied Sciences.
  6. 1 2 "us-en_cloud_blog_cloud-computing-history". www.ibm.com. 2017-01-06. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  7. ↑ "July, 1993 meeting report from the IP over ATM working group of the IETF". CH: Switch. Archived from the original on 2012-07-10. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
  8. ↑ Corbató, Fernando J. "An Experimental Time-Sharing System". SJCC Proceedings. MIT. Archived from the original on 6 September 2009. Retrieved 3 July 2012.
  9. ↑ Jungck, Kathleen; M. Rahman, Syed Shawon (2011-06-20). "Cloud Computing Avoids Downfall of Application Service Providers" (PDF). International Journal of Information Technology Convergence and Services. 1 (3): 1–20. doi:10.5121/ijitcs.2011.1301. S2CID   26010873.
  10. ↑ "Medidata History Timeline". Medidata Solutions. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  11. ↑ Levy, Steven (April 1994). "Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II". Wired . Archived from the original on 2018-06-14. Retrieved 2018-08-13.
  12. ↑ Levy, Steven (2014-05-23). "Tech Time Warp of the Week: Watch AT&T Invent Cloud Computing in 1994". Wired . Archived from the original on 2018-06-12. Retrieved 2018-08-13. AT&T and the film's director, David Hoffman, pulled out the cloud metaphor–something that had long been used among networking and telecom types. [...]
    "You can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud," says the film's narrator, [...]
    David Hoffman, the man who directed the film and shaped all that cloud imagery, was a General Magic employee.
  13. ↑ "Announcing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – beta". 24 August 2006. Archived from the original on 13 August 2014. Retrieved 31 May 2014.
  14. ↑ Qian, Ling; Lou, Zhigou; Du, Yujian; Gou, Leitao. "Cloud Computing: An Overview". researchgate.net. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  15. ↑ Helft, Miguel (2007-01-16). "Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  16. ↑ Naghshineh, M.; Ratnaparkhi, R.; Dillenberger, D.; Doran, J. R.; Dorai, C.; Anderson, L.; Pacifici, G.; Snowdon, J. L.; Azagury, A.; VanderWiele, M.; Wolfsthal, Y. (July 2009). "IBM Research Division cloud computing initiative". IBM Journal of Research and Development. 53 (4): 1:1–1:10. doi:10.1147/JRD.2009.5429055. ISSN   0018-8646.
  17. ↑ "Cluster Exploratory (CluE) nsf08560". www.nsf.gov. Archived from the original on 2018-12-01. Retrieved 2018-12-01.
  18. ↑ "Introducing Google App Engine + our new blog". Google Developer Blog. 2008-04-07. Archived from the original on 2017-06-27. Retrieved 2017-03-07.
  19. ↑ "App Engine". cloud.google.com. Archived from the original on 17 January 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
  20. ↑ Keep an eye on cloud computing Archived 2014-03-26 at the Wayback Machine , Amy Schurr, Network World, 2008-07-08, citing the Gartner report, "Cloud Computing Confusion Leads to Opportunity". Retrieved 2009-09-11.
  21. ↑ "Nebula Cloud Computing Platform: NASA". Open Government at NASA. 2012-11-20. Archived from the original on 2016-05-09. Retrieved 2020-11-15.
  22. ↑ "285 millions d'euros pour Andromède, le cloud souverain français - le Monde Informatique". 21 September 2011. Archived from the original on 2011-10-23.
  23. ↑ Hicks, Jacqueline (26 September 2019). "'Digital colonialism': why some countries want to take control of their people's data from Big Tech". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 2021-06-18. Retrieved 2021-05-21.
  24. ↑ "Orange enterre Cloudwatt, qui fermera ses portes le 31 janvier 2020". www.nextinpact.com. August 30, 2019. Archived from the original on October 24, 2020. Retrieved October 30, 2020.
  25. ↑ "Cloudwatt : Vie et mort du premier " cloud souverain " de la France". 29 August 2019. Archived from the original on 23 October 2020. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
  26. ↑ "Windows Azure General Availability". The Official Microsoft Blog. Microsoft. 2010-02-01. Archived from the original on 2014-05-11. Retrieved 2015-05-03.
  27. ↑ Milita Datta (August 9, 2016). "Apache CloudStack vs. OpenStack: Which Is the Best?". DZone · Cloud Zone. Archived from the original on August 3, 2017. Retrieved May 29, 2017.
  28. ↑ "OpenNebula vs OpenStack". SoftwareInsider.[ dead link ]
  29. ↑ "Launch of IBM Smarter Computing". Archived from the original on 20 April 2013. Retrieved 1 March 2011.
  30. ↑ "Apple to Launch iCloud on October 12". Apple Newsroom. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  31. ↑ "Launch of Oracle Cloud". The Register . Archived from the original on 4 March 2014. Retrieved 28 February 2014.
  32. ↑ "Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available with expanded OS support, transparent maintenance, and lower prices". Google Developers Blog. 2013-12-02. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2017-03-07.
  33. ↑ "DotCloud Pivots And Wins Big With Docker, The Cloud Service Now Part Of Red Hat OpenShift". TechCrunch. 2013-09-19. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  34. ↑ "Announcing General Availability of AWS Outposts". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Archived from the original on 2021-01-21. Retrieved 2021-02-04.
  35. ↑ "Remote work helps Zoom grow 169% in one year, posting $328.2M in Q1 revenue". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2023-01-17. Retrieved 2021-04-27.
  36. ↑ Reddy, Mantur Vivekvardhan; Charan, Paruchuri Sri; Devisaran, D.; Shankar, R.; Ashok Kumar, P. M. (March 2023). "A Systematic Approach towards Security Concerns in Cloud". 2023 Second International Conference on Electronics and Renewable Systems (ICEARS). pp. 838–843. doi:10.1109/ICEARS56392.2023.10085437. ISBN   979-8-3503-4664-0. S2CID   257958295.
  37. ↑ "IDC Forecasts Worldwide "Whole Cloud" Spending to Reach $1.3 Trillion by 2025". 2022-07-29. Archived from the original on 2022-07-29. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.