This post is the second in a series dedicated to learning about the basics of cloud computing and the open source alternatives available for home users. In first we review the antecedents prior to the emergence of the paradigm. These antecedents range from the formulation of the timeshare concept in the 50s, to the appearance of the first modern cloud service in 1999.
Now we are going to focus on the events that occurred in these 20 yearss. But, before we start, let's agree on the meaning of some concepts.
Means cloud computing to a resource management method computer scientists in which lLocal computers and storage devices are replaced by virtual infrastructure. The users they access processing and storage resources remotely. The particularity of Cloud Computing is that resources are allocated instantly as the user needs them.
History of the cloud. 20 years of Cloud Computing
Barely a year of the XNUMXst century had passed when Amazon decided to take the bull by the horns and solve a problem that other companies did not even take seriously. The underutilization of your computing resources. For that he modified his operations and created the necessary infrastructure for everything to be done in the cloud. This included of course the sale of the books via the web.
Four years later, in 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services. It was about offering online services to other websites, constituting an alternative to the offer of traditional web hosting providers. Another of the products in its catalog is called Amazon Mechanical Turk. AMT makes a variety of cloud-based services available to customers, including storage, computing, and "human intelligence."
More important to us is the appearance of the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), which allowed individuals rent virtual computers and use your own programs and applications.
That same year, and looking to take customers away from Microsoft without attacking it directly, Google decides to acquire two services that then worked separately.
It first acquired Writely which gave its users the ability to save documents, edit them, and transfer them to blogging systems. We are talking about documents compatible with Microsoft Word. He then purchased his online spreadsheet solution from 2Web Technologies. From the union of the two was born Google Docs
A year later Netflix started the first content streaming service in the cloud.
after a while the first open source solutions appear; Eucalyptus and OpenNebula
Eucalyptus could be used to build cloud computing environments and was compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Its name is an acronym in English for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture to link your programs to useful systems. Eucalyptus made it possible to pool compute, storage, and network resources that could be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads changed. Even if the project was discontinued, as its code was available under an open license, it was continued by other companies.
OpenNebula It is a project developed by NASA. Is about a cloud computing platform to handle heterogeneous infrastructures of distributed data centers.
One piece of information that indicates the consolidation of the new paradigm is Oracle's entry into the business in 2012. Larry Ellison, the president of the company, had been a staunch opponent of this business model.
With the appearance of mobile devices, users began to need solutions to synchronize content between their computers. Various companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo! and Dropbox among others, they launched different solutions so that people could store general or specific content. Due to the price war between the different providers, many of these services no longer exist. Few remember that Ubuntu offered you to open an account on its own storage platform during installation.
How to Live Aligned with I already wrote about the subject, and I will return to touch on it later, I did not mention the birth of many of the open source technologies related to the cloud and fully current. Nor did I comment on the alternatives to commercial services. For that they will have to wait for the next deliveries.