A simplified and very short history of the development of “clouds”

Quarantine, self-isolation – these factors have had a great impact on online business development. Companies are changing the concept of interacting with customers, new services and services are appearing. This has its advantages. And let some of the organizations return to the traditional format of work as soon as all restrictions are removed. But many who have managed to appreciate the benefits of the Internet will continue to develop online. This, in turn, will allow further development of many Internet companies, including cloud services. And how did the clouds develop? Cloud4Y introduces you to the shortest and easiest history of the industry.

Birth

It is impossible to unambiguously name the exact date of birth of cloud computing. But the starting point is the year 2006, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview after the Search Engine Strategies Conference: “We are witnessing the birth of a new model of computer systems, and it seems to me that there are not many people who are able to understand what is opening up perspective. Its essence is that services that support data and architecture are hosted on remote servers. The data is on these servers, the necessary calculations are performed on them … And if you have a computer, laptop, mobile phone or other device with the appropriate access rights, then you can access this cloud. ”

Around the same time, Amazon realized that work in the field of supply chain and retail management had made significant progress in the field of easily deployed infrastructure IT services. For example, computing or storage for databases. So why not try to start making a profit by offering these services to customers? This is how Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, the predecessor of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a non-problematic but well-known cloud service provider, came about.

Over the next few years, AWS reigned supreme in the cloud computing market, leaving only a small market share for other (very small) companies. But by 2010, other IT giants realized that they, too, would do well to engage in a “cloud business.” Interestingly, although Google had come to this conclusion earlier, it was arranged by Microsoft, which announced the launch of the public cloud (Windows Azure) in 2008. However, in reality, Azure earned only in February 2010. In the same year, the release of the project important for the cloud sector and the concept of “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) – OpenStack. As for Google, it only rocked by the end of 2011, when Google Cloud appeared after the extended beta of the Google App Engine.

New tools

All of these clouds were built using virtual machines (VMs), but managing VMs using traditional sysadmin tools was another challenge. The solution was the rapid development of DevOps. This concept combines technology, processes and a culture of interaction within the team. Simply put, DevOps is a set of practices focused on the close interaction of development specialists and information technology specialists, as well as the mutual integration of their work processes.

Thanks to DevOps and the ideas of continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment (CI / CD) in the beginning of 2010, the clouds gained the flexibility that helped them become a commercially successful product.

Another approach to virtualization (you probably guessed that it will be about containers) began to gain popularity in 2013. He greatly changed many processes in the cloud, influencing the development of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Yes, containerization wasn’t such a new technology, but by 2013, Docker made deploying applications and servers as convenient and simple as possible, offering containers to cloud providers and the industry as a whole.

Containers and Serverless Architecture

The development of this technology was a logical step, and Kubernetes, a container management tool, appeared in 2015. After a couple of years, Kubernetes became the standard for container orchestration. Its popularity has contributed to the growth of hybrid clouds. If earlier such clouds used inconvenient and sharpened for other tasks software for combining public and private clouds, then using Kubernetes the creation of hybrid clouds became an easier task.

At the same time (in 2014) AWS introduced the concept of serverless computing with Lambda. In this model, application functionality is not represented in virtual machines or containers, but in the form of large-scale services in the cloud. The new approach also influenced the growth of cloud computing.

So quickly we reached our time. Ten years ago, the cloud was understood in a slightly different way, and the concept itself was more likely hypothetical than real. If you could take any spherical CIO in a vacuum from 2010 and ask him if he plans to move to the cloud, then we would be laughed at. Too risky, daring, fantastic was this idea.

Today, in 2020, everything is different. Moreover, “thanks to” the new virus, cloud environments have become the focus of close attention of companies, which in principle did not consider the likelihood of using such technologies. And those who have used cloud solutions before, were able to mitigate the blow to business. As a result, CIOs may not be asking already if he plans to move to the cloud. And how he manages his cloud, what tools he uses and what he lacks.

Nowadays

We can expect that the current state of affairs will lead to the emergence of new tools that expand the functionality and flexibility of cloud environments. We follow developments with interest.

We also want to note another point: a business that before the pandemic offered the service of transferring business processes of “offline” companies online, is trying to attract new customers by offering special conditions. Cloud4Y, for example, offers free cloud for up to two months. Other companies also have tasty offers that would be hard to get at regular times. So for the digitalization of the business that politicians talked about so much, the most favorable conditions have now been created – take and use, test and verify.

What else is useful to read on the blog Cloud4y

→ Computer brands of the 90s, part 3, final
→ What is the geometry of the universe?
→ Easter eggs on topographic maps of Switzerland
→ How the hacker’s mother got into prison and infected the boss’s computer
→ How the bank broke

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