Early History of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a term that is increasingly becoming popular by the day as more and more people choose to employ the services that are offered. In cloud computing, this is a business that places their model in the selling of a virtual space in a server which is used in the storage of the data that is desired. This data is mostly files of work and applications that would ease the work load of planning them and it will be easier accessible to the clients.

The history of cloud computing goes back to the early 1990’s where there was the problem of the cost of creating a supercomputer. There were two methods of going about this to allow many people be hosted on this platform. First, there was the option of investing into acquiring a supercomputer; this was a large and expensive venture as a supercomputer was taken to be about 100 thousand normal sized Personal computers.

The other option, which is what Google employed, was the use of many Personal computers; link them up to form a pool of the resources of all these computers. This was the cheaper and more attractive of the options and through this, cloud computing was born. Many people did not care through which system their data was stored, but rather went with the cheaper option.

Carl Kesselman came up with the concept of cloud computing being simulated as a grid where he used a concept similar to that of electricity generation where he suggested that users of the net would be metered for storing data online in the large servers that were available. The charge attracted would be due to the service used and the content amount of data stored.

The cost of doing this was equated to the cost of the server space and the usage that was occasioned by the users. This meant that it was a cheaper alternative compared to using the conventional form of server allocation space as this meant that you paid for space even if you did not use it. This meant that the service offered in most cases ended up being unnecessarily being costly. The server space of the cloud computing came in to bridge the gap that was previously there.

History of Cloud Computing

Below are the most common companies that came up in this time and who have dominated the cloud computing market since.

1. Launch of Amazon Web Services – July 2002 this is arguably the largest cloud computing company in the world. It capitalized on the information on its sister site Amazon to come near clients as the solutions offered were specifically designed for the retailer
2. S3 Launches in March 2006 The S3 came in with the offering of pay per use pricing model and this cut for them a niche in the market for them. This became too popular and led all other cloud computing brands to being able to establish their niche in the market.
3. EC2 Launches in August 2006 This Company came closer to the people by availing the cloud computing infrastructure.
4. Launch of Google App Engine in April 2008 The market Search engine leader came in to the market to offer a spread of cloud computing services to even more people. Their pricing caps were also quite low.
5. Windows Azure launches Beta in Nov 2009 This came with minimal significance as it did not hold anything unique.