Data Center Handbook, 2nd Edition

5CLOUD AND EDGE COMPUTING

Jan Wiersma

EVO Venture Partners, Seattle, Washington, United States of America

5.1 INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD AND EDGE COMPUTING

The terms “cloud” and “cloud computing” have become essential part of the information technology (IT) vocabulary in recent years, after gaining its first popularity in 2009. Cloud computing generally refers to the delivery of computing services like servers, storage, databases, networking, applications, analytics, and more over the Internet, with the aim to offer flexible resources, economies of scale, and more business agility.

5.1.1 History

The concept of delivering compute resources using a global network has its roots in the “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept created by J.C.R. Licklider in the 1960s. Licklider was the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the US Pentagon's ARPA, and his concept inspired the creation of ARPANET, which later became the Internet. The concept of delivering computing as a public utility business model (like water or electricity) can be traced back to computer scientist John McCarthy who proposed the idea in 1961 during a speech given to celebrate MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) centennial.

As IT evolved, the technical elements needed for today's cloud computing evolved, but the required Internet bandwidth to provide these services reliably only emerged in the 1990s.

The first milestone for cloud computing was the 1999 launch of Salesforce.com ...