Few days ago while I was having a conversation one of my colleagues on Cloud Computing, he suddenly asked me that how cloud was evolved. Well, then I recalled some of discreet information that I looked at before. Whenever, a non-technical person ask me about Cloud, I feel little messy with the info I know. Anyway, the basic question was pretty much same.
What is cloud computing? How cloud computing has been evolved? Who invented cloud computing?
What is cloud computing The answer is almost everywhere on the internet. Wikipedia also has a fantastic definition of cloud computing. Cloud Computing is all about service. In the cloud, everything you are getting or providing has to be as a service. If not, the highest possibility is that you are not dealing with Cloud. So basically the three parts of cloud is IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The last two terms are pretty much understandable. Perhaps, two simple example is enough to define these two services. When we are talking about PaaS, that means we are talking about something like Google App Engine and when we are talking about SaaS, then we talking about services like Salesforce.com, Google Apps etc.
So here comes the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In a few words, here the vendors or the cloud service providers are outsourcing the hardware over the internet. This internet based computing models are called Cloud Computing.
1960s John McCarthy theorized of an eventual computing outsource model. He wrote that ‘computation may someday be organized as a public utility.’
There is no single term that defines cloud computing. It’s a collection of modern technologies, virtualization, Web Service and Service Oriented Architecture, Web 2.0 and Mashup.
NetCentric tried to trademark the ‘Cloud Computing’ in May 1997, patent serial number 75291765. But for some reason in April 1999 they abandoned it.
In March 23, 2007 Dell also applied for the patent.
Cloud Computing vs. Cloud Service Though these two sounds similar, but the two terminology have some fundamental differences. In easy words, when the IT specialists are deploying an IT foundation with servers, storage, network, application software and IP networks etc. and making the system ready to provide service to end users, that refers to Cloud Computing. Cloud Service is mostly related to the end users, here the user is getting the services in real time over the internet. Cloud Service mostly deals with pricing, user interface, system interface, APIs etc.
In 1999, Salesforce.com introduced that enterprise application solutions can be provided using websites. Amazon web services came in 2002 and Google Doc in 2006.
Well, it is told, that Microsoft once tried to make the hype back in 2001. They created something called ‘Hailstorm’ and used the phrase ‘cloud’ of computers. It was a matter of surprise that I couldn’t found the product name on wiki. To know more about the fact this article worth a read.
In August 9, 2006 in a Search Engine Strategies Conference, Eric Schmidt pick the word ‘Cloud Computing’. He used it to explain PaaS/SaaS. But it is also told that Eric took control of the term as Amazon was launching EC2 later that same month and which is also known as classic Google FUD.
Security issues There is also a question about the security issues. Reliability, Availability, and Security (RAS) are the three greatest concerns about migrating to the cloud. Reliability is often covered by a service level agreement (SLA).
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