History of the Cloud

So far in these blog posts I have mostly talked about why your business should make the switch to cloud. What I have not talked about however is how cloud came to become as big as it is today. I talk about the history of cloud computing here because in order to see the future with something, you must first look into it's past to see how it became.
Cloud computing first started off in 1999 when the arrival of Salesforce.com came into action. This website was made for delivering an enterprise application through the internet, which made way for software firms to deliver applications over the internet. Three years later in 2002, Amazon Web Services made a group of cloud based services to help run their website. This included cloud based storage, computation, and human intelligence through the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). AMT is a crowd sourcing Internet marketplace that lets people and firms organize the use of human intelligence to achieve jobs that computers can not do. Later in 2006 Amazon again boosted cloud computing to another level by launching its Elastic Compute cloud (EC2) as a web service that let small companies and individual people rent computers where they are able to run their own computer applications. The Amazon EC2 was said to be the first widely accessible cloud computing service that had ever been used. 

Just three years after EC2 had been created, perhaps one of the biggest milestones in cloud computing had taken place. Web 2.0 and Google started to offer browser-based business application (such as Google App store). These applications were so necessary and desirable that consumers would buy things far more expensive than they were used to just to run these applications. A real life example of this was the rise of smart phones and tablets, people bought these expensive gadgets in order to be able to run these killer applications. From then on the expansion of cloud computing was colossal. Now every day tasks that we do is all revolved around cloud, whether it is saving something to Google drive or iCloud, or booking a hotel reservation online. Many of the online tasks we do involve the cloud. 

By learning and understanding where cloud has come from, it is easy to develop an opinion on where it is going in the future. Many see that with the influence the internet has on society today, and the amount of growth cloud has experienced in such little time, the future of cloud will be monumental.

references:Steve. "New Cloudist Series – Outages in the Cloud - Part 1." New Cloudist Series – Outages in the Cloud. The Cloudist, 17 Jan. 2013. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.
, "Cloud Computing: Past, Present and Future." IPhone Repair Morris County Northern New Jersey Computer Repair. Intrepidweb, 5 Dec. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.

Mohammad, Arif. "A History of Cloud Computing." ComputerWeekly.com. Computer Weekly, n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2015.