Definition of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a type of service related to information technology, software, and the internet that provides on-demand, dynamically scalable, and inexpensive computing services through a network.
Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model that provides available, convenient, and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (including networks, servers, storage, application software, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned.
History of Cloud Computing
In March 2006, Amazon launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
On August 9, 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt first proposed the concept of “cloud computing” at the Search Engine Strategies conference (SES San Jose 2006). Google’s “cloud computing” originated from the “Google 101” project by Google engineer Christopher Beshlia.
In October 2007, Google and IBM began promoting cloud computing on American university campuses.
On February 1, 2008, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the establishment of the world’s first cloud computing center for Chinese software companies in the Wuxi Taihu New City Science and Education Industrial Park.
On July 29, 2008, Yahoo, HP, and Intel announced a joint research project to launch a cloud computing research test bed to promote cloud computing.
On August 3, 2008, the US Patent and Trademark Office website showed that Dell was applying for the “cloud computing” trademark to strengthen its control over the term that could reshape future technology architecture.
In March 2010, Novell and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) jointly announced a vendor-neutral plan called the “Trusted Cloud Initiative.”
In July 2010, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and supporting vendors such as Rackspace, AMD, Intel, and Dell announced the “OpenStack” open source code plan. Microsoft announced its support for the integration of OpenStack and Windows Server 2008 R2 in October 2010, while Ubuntu added OpenStack to version 11.04.
In February 2011, Cisco Systems officially joined OpenStack and focused on developing OpenStack’s network services.
Technical Background of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the commercial implementation of concepts in computer science such as parallel computing, distributed computing, and grid computing.
Cloud computing is the result of the mixed evolution and improvement of technologies such as virtualization, utility computing, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).