Ah the cloud…
Where to begin on this most mysterious concept?
From humans to chips, from smoke signals to light, we’ve come a long ways with computing and communications – In many ways, a reflections of human evolution itself.
From solitary nomads to small groups of collaborating individuals – meeting rarely, communicating even less. Collaboration spurred communication and more means to communicate began to develop. Cave art evolved into written and verbal communication.
The first remote communications that came to exist developed in many forms – smoke signals, messenger birds, written forms onto the telegraph as new discoveries were made. Each one expanding the speed, accuracy and range of the communicated message. As telecommunications developed and communications over electromagnetic mediums started to evolve, a clear increase in the pace of this change started to emerge.
On another path, computers began their own path of evolution. From the abacus, more complicated forms for mechanical devices requiring human operators started to take form all with the goal of automating or reducing manual involvement. Then came the era when computer development really started to springboard as transistors developed and evolved into integrated chips. Taking simple decision making (yes/no) to decisions that were multivariate enabling more complex automated decision making (per some level of programming). There was no slowing down the advent of that magical devices we use today. One thing was missing – these all operated individually and had no efficient way to share information, collaborate and share workloads. Every computer had to do everything. Then, somebody put these computer in touch with each other using telecommunications and suddenly information could be shared amongst them.
This started out in small communities – labs – and could not occur outside a room or a building. A local cloud was born. you could sit at your desk in the lab and access resources on another computer across the room. Eventually these rooms got connected and soon buildings too. Private clouds were born – Ok, really just intranets. These rooms and buildings generally belonged to an organization and if you could gain access (staying in the legal realm here) to the buildings you could access these resources.
This connectivity evolved and soon these buildings started to be connected. Technology developed to maintain the fidelity of the signals across long distances (a technological development on its own). You could now access resources across towns, countries and eventually continents. When these private clouds (or mini clouds) started to be connected and entry into these networks became democratized, gated by authentication and authorization rules, you had the first iterations of what we call the “Cloud”. At this point, these are formless and so really a nascent version of what we call clouds now. Conceptually, Clouds offer a wide range of services by giving form to these resources and making access secure and reliable. Along the way, innovators and thought leaders have looked at the “what” and wondered “why” leading new way of doing things – accelerating and evolving this concept. The way we connect, store, share and transform data is forever transformed and continuously transforming as this evolution gains pace and changes unstoppably.
NOTE:
This only has a semblance to history and for illustrative purposes. Accuracy not guaranteed or claimed.
This writeup ignores several things like authentication, access control etc that have always been a part of the picture and are at the heart of modern cloud computing.
Someone did a much more thorough job and made it available: https://soft.connect4techs.com/cloud-computing-tutorial-handwritten-pdf/