Basics

History

Cloud computing has gained a lot of traction over the last couple of years but it has been around for quite a long time. Shortly after the internet came into being the first cloud services were born. Nobody called it that but there is not much difference.

A web server that does some computation before we get the result, the webmail client, video editing on some platform, uploading snippets of information to some platform and so forth. All of these services do work on some server that is in the cloud, i.e. cloud computing.

The modern way of cloud computing that we usually think about is rightly connected to the rise of Amazon web services (aws). The legend goes as follows:

When Amazon started it just needed a couple of servers to run, the more the site got used the more servers it required. Soon it gotten so big that it built its on compute centers. They had a problem, during christmas shopping there where so many request that they needed a massive infrastructure to cope. The worst you can do is to have the customer waiting before he/she can order and maybe decide that it is not worth it, user experience above everything else. The rest of the time the compute center had resources unused. So they made a business model out of it and aws was born. The best customers where selling on Amazon anyway and used their cloud.

They were more or less the first public cloud provided and with their success soon others started as well. The entire cloud stack developed from there. Of course it was not exactly like that and a lot of open source developers and companies where involved and are still involved in creating the cloud stack.

On cloud conferences you will often see slides with millions of logos, something like:

What we now see is that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have the large platforms (in the west) and large companies, universities or something like the finance sector have their own private clouds.