Cloud computing origin and its uses
Ashutosh K.
Ex banker, Now self-employed, MD &CEO of Kumar Group of companies, Author of many books.
CLOUD ORIGIN AND ITS USE
?Technology Review?tracked the coinage of the term back to late 1996, ?Netscape’s Web browser was the admirable technology, at the office of ?Compaq Computer, a small group of technology executives was intriguing ?the future of the Internet business and calling it “cloud computing.”
Their vision was detailed and prescient. It made all business software change to the Web and termed “cloud computing-enabled applications” which made it easier for like consumer file storage. Just two men in the office one, a Compaq marketing executive named George Favaloro and other a young technologist named Sean O’Sullivan, cloud computing would have vividly different results. For Compaq, it was the start of a $2-billion-a-year business selling servers to Internet providers. Since then its feature enhanced and improved as per the user's trend and?Cloud computing becomes one of the powerful innovations of technology that has been still widely discussed and deliberated.
There may be differences of the actual origin of Cloud, how and why, but it comes in prominence after Google and Amazon introduced somewhere in 2006 naming ?“cloud computing” to define the new standard as soon as globally become increasingly accessing software, computer power, and files over the Web. Though its name still doesn’t get a place ?in the Oxford English Dictionary, its use is?rolled out rapidly on account of ?capturing ?a momentous shift in the IT industry as more computer memory, processing power, and apps are hosted in remote data centers or the “cloud.” With billions of dollars of IT spending in play, the term itself became a disputed prize as many companies tried to prove their product. Dell attempted in 2008 ?to ?win a trademark on “cloud computing.” After indignation of the programmers after attempting to technology vendors, such as IBM and Oracle, have been accused of “cloud washing,” or misusing the phrase to describe older product lines.
Like “Web 2.0,” cloud computing has become a pervasive piece as many tech executives could not resist adopting it. The U.S. government has also been baffled with the term as some agencies propel to move to cheaper cloud services, procurement officials were unable to describe what, exactly, counted as cloud computing. Therefore, the government swiftly asked the National Institutes of Standards and Technology to come up with a definition. However, there is no consensus that emerged instead in the final draft, it is cautioned that “cloud computing can and does mean different things to different people.”
“The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. It’s a rebranding of the Internet,” says Reuven Cohen, cofounder of Cloud Camp, a course for programmers. “That is why there is a raging debate. By virtue of being a metaphor, it’s open to different interpretations.” And, he adds, “it’s worth money.”
?In spite of the confusion of who can be given credit for inventing the idea. The notion of network-based computing?goes to 1960, but the first use of “cloud computing” in its modern context happened on August 9, 2006, while Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressing an industry conference,?coined the term “What’s interesting [now] is that there is an emergent new model,” “I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing—they should be in a “cloud” somewhere.”
The term began to?become wider use the following year after companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM started to vendor cloud-computing efforts.. That was also when it first appeared in newspaper articles, such as a?New York Times?report from November 15, 2007, that carried the headline “I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing,’ ” It described vague plans for “Internet-based supercomputing.”
Sam Johnston, director of cloud and IT services at Equinix, in an email?address to the tech expert, wrote ?“We now had a common handle for a number of trends that we had been observing, such as the consumerization and commoditization of IT. Johnston says it’s never been clear who coined the term. As an editor of the Wikipedia entry for cloud computing, Johnston closely monitoring on any attempts at misappropriation. He was first to raise alarms about Dell’s trademark application and this summer he removed a citation from Wikipedia saying a professor at Emory had coined the phrase in the late 1990s.
?In May 1997 trademark application for “cloud computing” from a now-defunct company called NetCentric was for “educational services” such as “classes and seminars” and was never approved. But the use of the phrase was not coincidental. When?Technology Review?tracked down NetCentric’s founder,?O’Sullivan, he agreed to help dig up paper copies of 15-year-old business plans from NetCentric and Compaq. The documents, written in late 1996, not only extensively use the phrase “cloud computing,” but also describe inaccurate terms many of the ideas sweeping the Internet today.
Cloud 1.0:?Entrepreneur Sean O’Sullivan filed a trademark on “cloud computing” in 1997. He poses at the offices of NetCentric, in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the late 1990s. At the time, O’Sullivan’s startup was negotiating a $5 million investment from Compaq, where Favaloro had recently been chosen to lead a new Internet services group. The group was a kind of internal “insurgency,” recalls Favaloro, that aimed to get Compaq into the business of selling servers to Internet service providers, or ISPs, like AOL. NetCentric was a young company developing software that could help make that happen.
In their plans, the duo predicted technology trends that would take more than a decade to unfold.?Copies of NetCentric’s business plan contain an imaginary bill for “the total e-purchases” of one “George Favaloro,” including $18.50 for 37 minutes of video conferencing and $4.95 for 253 megabytes of Internet storage (as well as $3.95 to view a Mike Tyson fight). Today, file storage and video are among the most used cloud-based applications, according to consultancy CDW. NetCentric’s software platform was meant to allow ISPs to implement and bill for dozen to gradually thousands, of “cloud computing-enabled applications,”.
Favaloro or O’Sullivan who brought ahead the term cloud computing will remain unclear. Favaloro believes he coined the term. From a storage unit, he dug out a paper copy of a 50-page internal Compaq analysis titled “ISDS for CC” dated November 14, 1996. The document accurately predicts that enterprise software would give way to Web-enabled services and that in the future, “application software is no longer a feature of the hardware but of the Internet.”
O'Sullivan tried to trademark it, as he was constantly present at Compaq’s Texas headquarters at the time. O’Sullivan located a daily planner, dated October 29, 1996, in which he had jotted down the phrase “Cloud Computing: The Cloud has no Borders” following a meeting with Favaloro that day. That handwritten note and the Compaq business plan, separated by two weeks, are the earliest documented references to the phrase “cloud computing”.
Both agree that “cloud computing” was born as a marketing term. At the time, telecom networks were already referred to as the cloud; in engineering drawings, a cloud represented the network. The fast-developing Internet opportunity to businesses Compaq knew about. “Computing was the bedrock for Compaq.
In fact, Compaq thought it better to forget the term entirely and h its plans for Internet software. ?to Favaloro succeeded to point Compaq (which later merged with HP) toward what became a huge business selling servers to early Internet providers and Web-page hosters, like UUNet. “It’s ridiculous now, but the big realization we had was that there was going to be an explosion of people using servers, not on their premises,” says Favaloro. “I went from being a heretic inside Compaq to being treated like a prophet.”
Favaloro now heads an environmental consulting firm in Waltham, Massachusetts. What is remarkable, he says, is that the cloud he and O’Sullivan imagined 15 years ago has become a reality. “I now run a 15-person company and, in terms of making us productive, our systems are far better than those of any of big company. We bring up and roll out new apps in a matter of hours. If we like them, we keep them, if not, we abandon them. We self-administer, everything meshes, we have access everywhere, it’s safe, it’s got great uptime, it’s all backed up, and our costs are tiny, Now file storage and video are among the most used cloud-based applications.
?Whoever is the father of cloud computing, it seems wise to discuss innovative features of cloud computing.
NEW DEFINITION OF CLOUD COMPUTING
Initially, there was Client/Server computing which is basically centralized storage in which all the software applications, all the data, and all the controls are stored on the server-side. If a single user needs to access specific data or run a program, the user has d to connect to the server and then gain appropriate access and then can do business.
Then, distributed computing came into the picture, where all the computers are networked together and share their resources when needed. On the basis of the above computing, there was emerging of cloud computing concepts that were later?implemented..
Though in 1961, John MacCharty proposed in a speech at MIT that computing can be sold like a utility, just like water or electricity. It was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas, it was ahead of its time, as for the next few decades, despite interest in the model, the technology simply was not ready for it.
After the passage of ?time ?the technology caught that idea and after a few years miracle happened as under:
In 1999,?Salesforce.com?went ahead by distributing of applications to users with g a simple website. The applications were sent to enterprises over the Internet, this made a dream of computing traded as utility proved a reality..
In 2002,?Amazon?started Amazon Web Services, providing services like storage, computation, and even human intelligence. However, only starting with the launch of the Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006 a truly commercial service open to everybody existed.
In 2009,?Google Apps?also started to provide cloud computing enterprise applications.
All the big technology companies are present in the cloud computing evolution, ?earlier or later.?In 2009,?Microsoft?launched Windows Azure, and companies like Oracle and HP have all joined the game. This proves that today, cloud computing has become mainstream.
领英推荐
SOME OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO USE CLOUD COMPUTING.
?1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
IaaS brings fundamental compute, network, and storage resources to consumers on-demand, over the internet, and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Using an existing infrastructure on a pay-per-use scheme seems to be a consensus pick for companies saving on the cost of investing to acquire, manage, and maintain an IT infrastructure.?
PaaS offers customers a complete platform—hardware, software, and infrastructure—for developing, running, and managing applications without the cost, complexity, and inflexibility of building and maintaining that platform on-premises. Organizations may turn to PaaS for the same reasons they look to IaaS, while also seeking to increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use platform to deploy applications.
2. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud
A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party?public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads. This unique mix of public and private cloud resources provides an organization the ease of picking optimal cloud for each application or workload and moving workloads freely between the two clouds as circumstances change. Technical and business objectives are fulfilled more effectively and cost-efficiently than could be with public or private cloud alone.
Multi-cloud moves things ahead further and enables customers to use two or more clouds from different cloud providers. This can be any mix of Infrastructure, Platform, or Software as a Service. With multi-cloud, a decision can be made easier which workload is best suited to which cloud-based on exclusive requirements, and it will further enable to sidestep vendor lock-in.
3. Test and development
One of the best applications for the use of a cloud is a test and development environment. This entails securing a budget and setting up the environment through physical assets, significant manpower, and time. Then comes the installation and configuration of the platform. All this can often extend the time it takes for a project to be completed and stretch customer signposts. Cloud computing, ?often combines but is not limited to, automated provisioning of physical and?virtualized resources.
4. Big data analytics
By leveraging cloud computing is the ability to use big data analytics no tap into vast quantities of both structured and unstructured data to tackle the benefit of extracting business value. Retailers and suppliers are now extracting information derived from consumers’ buying patterns to target their advertising and marketing campaigns to a particular segment of the population. Social networking platforms are now providing the basis for analytics on behavioral patterns that organizations are using to derive meaningful information.
5. Cloud storage
The prospect of storing files and accessing, storing, and retrieving them from any web-enabled simple interface. Anytime and anywhere it has high availability, speed, scalability, and security for the environment. ?In such cases, organizations are only paying for the storage which is consumed. It works o so without the worries of overseeing the daily maintenance of the storage infrastructure. It is also the option to store the data either on- or off-premises depending on the regulatory compliance requirements. Data is stored in virtualized pools of storage hosted by a third party based on the customer specification requirements.
?6. Disaster recovery(DR)
Yet another benefit derived from using the cloud is the cost-effectiveness of a??(DR) solution that provides for faster recovery from a network of different physical locations at a lower cost than the traditional DR site with fixed assets, inflexible procedures, and a higher cost.
7. Data backup -a very useful use
Backing up data has always been a complex and time-consuming operation. This included maintaining a set of tapes or drives, manually collecting them, and dispatching them to a backup facility with all the inherent problems that might happen in between the originating and the backup site. This way of ensuring a backup is performed is not immune to problems (such as running out of backup media), and there is also the time it takes to load the backup devices for a restore operation, which takes time and is prone to malfunctions and human errors.
Cloud-based backup, not fully error-free, but certainly better. We can automatically dispatch data to any location across the wire with the guarantee that neither security, availability nor capacity issues.
?CONCLUSION
Though not a new idea, accelerating momentum can be gauged from its usages in various spheres of life.?All the benefits can not be explained but surely provide an encouragement to use the cloud when compared to more traditional alternatives to increase IT infrastructure flexibility, as well as leverage on big data analytics and?mobile computing.
The future of this technology looks very promising.
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