The first known statement in a Compaq internal document appeared on cloud computing” as early as 1996.
Back in 1977, and by 1981, CSNET was used for Cloud Symbols in the original ARPANET, both Internet predecessors themselves. The symbol is the Cloud Symbol. The word cloud served to indicate a network for telephony schematics as a metaphor for the internet and a standardized cloud-like form. This simplification means that the details of how a network’s endpoints are linked are not relevant to the understanding of the diagram.
Cloud computing offers computer system resources on-demand, in particular data storage and computing power, without direct user active management. Large clouds often have functions spread over various sites, where each site is a data center. Cloud computing usually uses a pay-as-you-go model that can help reduce capital spending but also lead to unexpected operating costs for unskilled users to achieve consolidation and economically efficient computing.
Back in 1993, Apple spins General Magic and AT&T in describing (pair) its Telescript and Personalink technologies, the term cloud was used to refer to the platforms for distributed computing. Andy Hertzfeld commented on Telescript, General Magic’s distributed programming language, in the April 1994 feature Bill and Andy’s Excellent Adventure II:
The beauty of Telescript is that we now have the whole Cloud out there instead of simply having a programming device and that a single program can go to various sources of information and create a virtual service. Nobody had previously conceived that. The Jim White example [the Telescript, X.400 and ASN designers are now using the date setting system is a service that a software agent uses to go into the flower shop and shop for flowers and then goes into the ticket storage and gets tickets for the show.
2000s
The aim of the company Amazon Web Services subsidiary was to “create innovative and business applications on its own” in July 2002. Amazon introduced its Simple Storage Service (S3) in March 2006, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) introduced it in August 2006. The use of server virtualization to supply IaaS at a lower on-demand price was pioneered by those products.
Google released the Google App Engine beta in April 2008. The App Engine is a PaaS (one of the first) to provide users with a fully maintained infrastructure for creating web applications using common languages/technologies such as Python, Node.js, and PHP. The objective was to eliminate the need for certain typical IaaS administrative tasks by establishing a platform where users could easily deploy and requested such applications.
In early 2008, NASA’s Nebula became the first open-source software to implement hybrid, private and cloud-based solutions, and was expanded into the RESERVOIR project financed by the European Commission.
By mid-2008 Gartner noticed that “companies switch from the hardware, software, to service-based modeling of the per-use services” to “projecting a computer transition to dramatic growth in IT products in some countries by mid-2008, to shape the relationships between consumers of IT services, those who utilize IT services and the people who sell it.”
The U.S. National Science Foundation started a cluster research exploration program in 2008 that includes the analysis of large volumes of data using Google-IBM cluster technology.
In 2009, the French government announced Project Andromède, with the government spending €285 million, on a sovereign cloud or national cloud computing. Cloudwatt was shut down on 1 February 2020 The initiative failed badly.
2010s
Microsoft released Microsoft Azure in February 2010 and the October 2008 announcement.
A joint open-source cloud initiative known as OpenStack was initiated by Rackspace Hosting with NASA in July 2010. The OpenStack project is designed to support cloud-based organizations with standard hardware services. Early code was obtained both from NASA’s Nebula and from the Cloud Files platform in Rackspace. As an open-source offering, it has attracted the attention of several key communities together with other open-source solutions such as CloudStack, Ganeti, and OpenNebula. Various studies aim to compare these open source products on the basis of a number of criteria.
The IBM SmartCloud framework supporting Smarter Planet was announced by IBM on 1 March 2011. Cloud computing is a critical aspect of the different elements of the Smarter Computing foundation. Oracle reported Oracle Cloud on June 7, 2012. This is the first cloud offering that gives users access to an integrated set of IT solutions, which includes application (SaaS), platform (PaaS), and layers for infrastructure (IaaS).
In May 2012, Google Compute Engine was published in advance and launched in December 2013.
Linux was Microsoft Azure’s most popular operating system in 2019. In December 2019 Amazon announced AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that provides a fully integrated hybrid experience to AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and instruments for virtually any customer data center, colocation area, or on-site facility.