{"id":743,"date":"2012-05-23T17:16:35","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T17:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/?p=743"},"modified":"2014-09-15T09:02:27","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T13:02:27","slug":"a-walk-through-the-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/?p=743","title":{"rendered":"A Walk through the Clouds"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Unless you live under a rock on a deserted island, chances are you have heard about, considered using, or are moving toward \u201cThe Cloud.\u201d\u00a0 It is now a prevalent and unavoidable topic of conversation that has finally made its way from computing industry professionals to the general populace. \u00a0\u00a0In the very near future, \u201cThe Cloud\u201d will have become just another term in the lexicon of technology that people accept as a part of their daily computer activity, even if they don\u2019t entirely understand it.\u00a0 Much like instant messaging, search engine, the web, and Wi-Fi, the cloud is rapidly becoming as much a part of our daily lives as the bowl of cereal we have to start our day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>So how is it that most people can\u2019t actually explain what the cloud is or where it came from?\u00a0 How can something that is rapidly becoming a standard still be such a vague mystery to most who use it?\u00a0 Rather than wondering how this phenomenon evolved, I thought it might be a great use of this space to explain how the cloud actually came to be.\u00a0 My hope is that by understanding where the cloud came from, the reader can see how it will continue to develop.<\/p>\n

The Cloud had very humble beginnings in the 1960\u2019s as a future concept discussed by people like Joseph Licklider and Douglas Parkhill.\u00a0 And while that discussion continued for decades, it was a very slow evolution from concept to proof of concept as developers and futurists were forced to wait for technology to develop a strong foundation upon which the concept could be explored.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Once internet service had begun to invade homes across the world in the 1990\u2019s, the development and deployment of the infrastructure for rapid development of a grid (both electrical and computing) hit terminal velocity, as demand far outweighed supply. \u00a0For the first time, the intranet \/ local network architecture employed by large businesses in enclosed environments could be employed on a much bigger open scale.\u00a0 This leap forward led to the birth of global pioneers like VMware and Salesforce who led the way in proliferating concepts such as SaaS (Software as a Service) and Virtualization.<\/p>\n

With the success of this new internet model, which allowed individual users to integrate online content from anywhere with their own individual website \/ digital presence, the cloud was well on its way to becoming the natural evolution of the current model of hardline internet service and data sharing.\u00a0\u00a0 In 2003, Nicholas Carr began publishing a series of articles and books about the future growth of cloud computing under the banner \u201cIT Doesn\u2019t Matter\u201d where he extrapolated that internet access and use would become a common and accepted commodity like other utilities such as water or electricity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>After that, the dominoes continued to fall quickly.\u00a0 Throughout the decade there was a string of advances including Amazon\u2019s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model which laid the foundation for the \u201cpay-for-use\u201d cloud business model, the PaaS (Platform as a Service) model developed by Salesforce via Force.com, and the open source cloud platform created by Eucalyptus.\u00a0 This, in turn, led to market giants such as Google and Gartner taking notice and making sure that everyone else did as well.<\/p>\n

Since then, the paradigm has shifted as continuing technological advances have outpaced the ability of both futurists and market experts to predict the next advancement in data storage and sharing.\u00a0 But for the time being, it is comforting to know that we live in an age where a walk through the clouds requires nothing more than sitting at a desk and clicking a mouse.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Unless you live under a rock on a deserted island, chances are you have heard about, considered using, or are moving toward \u201cThe Cloud.\u201d\u00a0 It is now a prevalent and unavoidable topic of conversation that has finally made its way from computing industry professionals to the general populace. \u00a0\u00a0In the very near future, \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23],"tags":[95,24,96,97,98,13,94,43,29],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-general","tag-amazon","tag-cloud-computing","tag-eucalyptus","tag-gartner","tag-google","tag-network-computer","tag-salesforce","tag-technology-solutions","tag-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2743,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions\/2743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.thinmanager.com\/thinclients\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}