History and Evolution of Cloud Computing

One of the most intriguing questions asked about cloud computing is “When and where was the first premise of cloud computing witnessed?”

The very first step towards cloud computing was witnessed as early as the 1950s and with time this technology has grown into one of the most powerful tools for conducting business efficiently.

The below section explains the growth of cloud computing over the last 50 years.

1950-1960:
The concept of time-sharing was introduced to allow multiple users to gain shared access to data and CPU time. This was done to lower the cost of maintenance of large-sized computers.
1960-1970:
ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the basis of internet was introduced. The basis of staying connected and accessing data from any location was established.
1970-1980:
IBM introduced the Virtual Machine OS, and this enabled users to have multiple virtual machines on a single physical node.
1980-1990:
The time period between 1980 and 1990 witnessed the emergence of Internet Service Providers and Application Service Providers, which broke the realm of desktops and single user server to deliver hosted applications services. Another important trend during this period was the realization of efficiency through multi-tenant environments.
1990-2000:
The internet became more prevalent, and virtualized connections for PC-based systems grew to correct network traffic and bandwidth usage. Grid computing gained popularity along with object-oriented programming and web services. Grids were formed by a network of loosely coupled computers along with communication channels to perform complex tasks. Grid computing is said to be one of the early avatars of Cloud Computing.
After 2000:
The 21st century witnessed tremendous growth of the cloud as more and more corporate solutions and services from players like IBM and Oracle inundated the market.
Evolution of Cloud Computing--

Cloud computing as compared to any technology is an ever-evolving model, with improved capabilities being announced regularly. If you look closely, it is a logical evolution of computing itself, where we started from mainframe computers in early 1960’s and progressed to minicomputers, personal computers, mobile devices, and now cloud computing.

A major trend that caused a strong shift towards cloud computing was the emergence of grid computing. In grid computing, the aim was to move a workload to the location of the needed computing resources. In other words, a grid acts like a single virtual server. A decade after this, the concept of virtualisation began to be considered beyond servers to storage, platforms as well as applications.

The concept of virtualisation emerged during 1990s. Virtualisation is the concept of creating logical computing resources (such as multiple servers) with limited physical resources (from a single physical server hardware available). It was then slowly expanded to virtual platforms that included storage and network resources. These virtual applications did not have any dedicated hardware or infrastructure support. Then came utility computing that offered clustered virtual platforms for handling complex tasks and business applications with a metered business model.

In the last decade, this evolved into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which tremendously improvised the concept of virtualisation. In SaaS, the business model of charging is not by the resources that are consumed but by the value of the application to subscribers.Cloud computing thus evolved as a result of various trends (like grid, utility and SaaS) put together and it emerged as the ability to access computing resources and applications from anywhere and at any time.