THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY: CLOUD COMPUTING

THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY: CLOUD

Cloud Computing is nothing less than a dream come true with the evolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Its rightly said; “Every cloud has a silver lining”, but wait, here we have a silver cloud available at our service 24 x 7. Cloud Computing is the fifth generation of computing after Mainframe, Personal computer, Client-Server computing and the Web. A cloud is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources.

 

What is Cloud Computing technology?

Cloud computing is a technology that puts your entire computing infrastructure both hardware and software, applications, etc online. It uses internet and remote, central servers to maintain data and applications. Gmail, Yahoo mail, Facebook, Hotmail, Orkut, etc are all the most basic and widely used examples of cloud computing. One does not need his own PC or laptop to check some stored mail/data/photos in the mailbox but any computer with an internet connection since the data is stored with the mail service provider on a remote cloud. The technology in essence is a geographical shift in the location of our data from personal computers to a centralized server or ‘cloud’. Typically, cloud services charges its customers on usage basis. Hence it is also called Software as a Service (SaaS). It aims to provide infrastructure and resources online in order to serve its clients; Dynamism, Abstraction and Resource Sharing.

History and Evolution:

The term “cloud” was actually derived from telephony. The telecommunication companies offered Virtual Private Network with good quality at cheaper rates. The symbol of the cloud represented the demarcation point which was the sole responsibility of the provider. Cloud computing manages the servers and network infrastructure. In 1977, Ramnath Chellappa first coined the word cloud computing.

 

It is actually difficult to quote the exact history of cloud computing, it being a concept evolved from many other prevalent techniques of the digital world. It has essentially evolved from various computing technologies like grid computing, utility computing, parallel computing, and virtualization. The most recent development of cloud computing has evolved from the Web2.0 technology which caters to web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design etc. Examples of Web 2.0 include wikis, blogs, social networking sites, video sharing sites etc.

 

The evolution of cloud computing can be bifurcated into three basic phases:

The Idea Phase - This phase incepted in the early 1960s with the emergence of utility and grid computing and lasted till pre internet bubble era.

1. The Pre-cloud Phase - The pre-cloud phase originated in the 1999 and extended to 2006. In this phase internet as the mechanism to provide Application as Service got developed.
2. The Cloud Phase - The much talked about real cloud phase started in the year 2007 when The classification of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS got formalized. The history of cloud computing has witnessed some very interesting breakthroughs launched by some of the leading computer/web organizations of the world. The following picture exhibits the significant applications which triggered the growth of cloud computing.  

                                                                                                                                                  

This discussion flouts without firm mention to Amazon’s S3 and EC2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online storage web service which provides storage through web service interface. It was launched in March 2006. Similarly, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.Amazon played a major in the field of cloud computing. In 2008, Eucalyptus emerged as the first open-source AWS, API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds. The bourgeoning cloud computing technology fetched further hype when leaders like Google, IBM and Microsoft entered the arena. IBM’s ‘Blue Cloud, Google online ‘App Engine’ (for ex. online spreadsheets), Microsoft’s Azure and Apple’s icloud are some other energy boosters.