CLOUD COMPUTING!

[Image: Cloud Computing by Rocío Lara. CC License.]

Cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is a factor and a metaphor of the internet. Since the sixties, cloud computing has developed along a number of lines with Web 2.0 being the most recent evolution. Salesforce.com was one of the first milestones in cloud computing history dropped in 1999 which it was a concept of an application in a simple website. The next development was Amazon Web Services that it was dropped in 2002 that it provided a cloud base service including storage, computation and even human intelligence through the Amazon Mechanical Turk. In 2006, Amazon launched its Elastic Compute cloud (EC2) as a commercial web service that allows small companies and individuals to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. In 2009, another big milestone came to cloud computing and this was Google Apps, it started when Web 2.0 hit its stride and Google and others started to establish their terms as well. These are the top 10 most popular apps that are used for Cloud Computing: Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com, Box, Google Apps, Concur, Amazon Web Services, Zendesk, Dropbox, LinkedIn and GoDaddy.

There’s many ways to describe the evolution of cloud computing, but the most briefly way to explain it, based on a IBM article about the subject, is with this list of things. First there’s Grid computing, which is solving a large problem with parallel computing. Then there’s Utility computing that offers computing resources as a metered service. After that comes SaaS, which is network-based subscriptions to applications. Finally, there’s Cloud computing, the theme we’re discussing, which means having anytime access to IT resources delivered dynamically as a service. You can find more information about this topic on twitter, thanks to some experts about the topic that decided to open an account. Some of those are @Dropbox, @Office, @Googledrive, @DavidLinthicum, @cloud_and_grid, @PaulOBrien, @bernardgolden, @CloudNativeFdn, @Cloudpro, and @IBMcloud.