Cloud Computing- A brief History

Now as a techie, all of us know something about Cloud Computing but, here are some details for those who don’t as well as those who do and want to know more. First and foremost Cloud Computing concept cannot be considered to be a development by one particular person or organization; it’s the outcome of years of hard work by various organizations. Cloud Computing has a pretty good history. It was known as the “Intergalactic-Computer Networking” earlier in the late 60’s and was proposed by this man called J.C.R. Licklider. Today the term “Intergalactic-Computer Networking” is simply known as Inter-Net. Licklider was the direct predecessor to Internet. Now how many of us know which year was Internet invented? Well many of us would say its 2001 or 2003 as for it was this time when we started using it but, the answer is 1990’s. Licklider was a man with vision; he was responsible for enabling the development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency of NETwroking). ARPANET developed in 1969 for the American Defense & various Universities. Then in 80’s NSFNET (National Science Foundation NETworking) with a slight mod i.e. higher capacity came to be seen. This allowed academic researches only. Now finally the two all time great researches were combined and launched in the name of Internet. The credit of this idea goes to Licklider though there are many who lead to the compilation. Now call it there style or something but, Intergalactic-Networking was a bit odd hence Americans who they prefer making acronyms shortened it as Internet. From then researches and development have been done continuously on this field of transferring information from one corner of the world to other. It may look very simple as I write but, it isn’t. First researches were done in a small area like a building then increasing the scope to cities and finally countries. Today the entire world is in our fist. Now to build up something means to continuously develop and update it in all ways. The technology, method of implications and various other things need to be upgraded. Thus in 2003/04 this Internet which in simple words is a set of rules and by which it governs itself, was coined as a cloud. Licklider’s vision was compared to a cloud something as big as to store information available on net. Going back to late 60’s we come to know that ‘twas John McCarthy who proposed the idea of computation being delivered as a public utility.

Since the sixties, cloud computing has developed along a number of lines, with Web 2.0 being the most recent evolution. However, since the internet only started to offer significant bandwidth in the nineties, cloud computing for the masses has been something of a late developer.

One of the first milestones for cloud computing was the arrival of Salesforce.com in 1999, which pioneered the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. The services firm paved the way for both specialist and mainstream software firms to deliver applications over the internet.

The next development was Amazon Web Services in 2002, which provided a suite of cloud-based services including storage, computation and even human intelligence through the Amazon Mechanical Turk

That what I discussed was a brief history of Networking. Now what I’m about to discuss is on the Cloud itself. Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data access, and cloud services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the cloud that delivers the services. Also, it is a delivery model for IT clouds, the services based on Internet protocols, and it typically involves provisioning of dynamically scalable and often virtualized clouds. Clouds are formed due to the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet (The biggest cloud of all).This may take the form of web-based tools or applications that users can access and use through a cloud web browser as if the programs were installed locally on their own cloud-puters.

Autonomic computing— Computer systems capable of self-management.

Client–server model— Client–server computing refers broadly to any distributed application that distinguishes between service providers (servers) and service requesters (clients).

Grid computing — "A form of distributed and parallel computing, whereby a 'super and virtual computer' is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers acting in concert to perform very large tasks."

Mainframe computer— Powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, police and secret intelligence services, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.

Utility computing— The "packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility, such as electricity."

Peer-to-peer — Distributed architecture without the need for central coordination, with participants being at the same time both suppliers and consumers of resources (in contrast to the traditional client–server model).

So basically, CLOUD is a virtual world which governs and facilitates the data storage, modification, updating, transferring over wires or waves.