Software Architecture in Practice, Third Edition

26. Architecture in the Cloud

There was a time when every household, town, farm or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap; cloud computing works in a similar fashion.

—Vivek Kundra

If you have read anything about the history of computing, you will have read about time-sharing. This was the era, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, sandwiched between eras when individuals had sole, although limited, access to multimillion-dollar computers and when individuals had access to their own personal computers. Time-sharing involved multiple users (maybe as many as several hundred) simultaneously accessing a powerful mainframe computer through a terminal, potentially remote ...