Blog # 2

Journey of the Cloud

By: Chelsea Muckerman

Did you realize that the evolution of Cloud Computing started before most of our parents were born? In the 1950’s, time sharing was developed and allowed multiple users to interact with computers simultaneously using mainframe computers. Later, IBM took this idea one step further and began what we now refer to as Software as a Service (SaaS) based on mainframe.

Much, much later, in 1994, Magic Cap was introduced which was an operating system that made use of applications on low-powered handheld devices in communication with a network of computers via a cell phone link. While Magic cap was a short lived, it was this type of thinking that lead to today’s cloud.

Web 2.0 was born in the late 1990’s and in 1999 Salesforce.com was introduced. Salesforce.com was the first mainstream cloud-based SaaS success story and a few years later, in 2002, Amazon introduced Amazon Web Service. In 2006 Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a commercial web service which was the first widely accessible cloud computing infrastructure service.

The cloud began to affect the younger crowd in 1999 when Napster was founded and really took off in 2004 when Facebook launched and the social media craze began. Twitter jumped on board in 2006, followed by Instagram and Pinterest in 2010.

In 2009 Google launched Google Maps, which is connected to the Google cloud. Being connected to the cloud makes it possible for the software to provide the most up-to-date map data and it also provides live traffic data- which we all know is a huge bonus. Do you ever wonder what life was like before GPS?

2011 was the year that Cloud Computing truly took off and today there are a multitude of cloud computing companies spanning from anti-spam services to social media and GPS. When you check your emails through gmail, share pictures on dropbox or video chat on skype, you are already using a cloud-based software.  

Before you read this post, did you realize how often you used the cloud? I sure didn't.

Works Cited:

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/A-history-of-cloud-computing

http://sourcedigit.com/497-timeline-history-of-cloud-computing/

What is Cloud Computing?

By: Ryan Shoaf

Cloud computing is defined by Google as, “the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.” Through research, and exploration of this topic I found that I personally do not think cloud computing has a technical definition. I feel this way because, the term “Cloud Computing” is more of an expression that can be used for various types of computing concepts.

In cloud computing the term “cloud” is derived from the combination of networks, storage, hardware, interfaces, and services that come together to form a computing service. What attracts many individuals, and companies to cloud computing are its flexibility, and elasticity, which allows the resource allocation to get bigger, or smaller depending on demand. Along with flexibility, cloud computing allows self-service provisioning, standardized interfaces, and service usage metering. These key characteristics allow users to eliminate many complex constraints such as, space, power, cost, and time.

While cloud computing is used for various things, the main categories of cloud services include, Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (Paas), and Infrastructure as a service (Iaas). In cloud computing there are three types of clouds: A public cloud which are owned by companies, private clouds controlled by a single company, and a hybrid cloud which uses characteristics of a public cloud to create a private clouds that allows it to work with IT resources.

Work Cited:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=what+is+cloud+computing&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=what+is+cloud+computing&rls=en&safe=off

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/what-is-cloud-computing.html

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-is-cloud-computing.html