When the cloud terminology initially made its presence known, I must admit I was a bit confused. I mean, clouds are up in the sky; so what’s with gravity constrained servers hanging up there too? But as time has past, I’m now clearer than ever before. In fact, I put this little cloud pictogram together to help those of you still in the dark.
I often wonder who chose cloud to be the name for what we are now all very familiar with and what the other name contenders were. I can see the appeal of the cloud analogy, except that they aren’t very reliable – coming and going and sometimes completely disappearing. Not what I want to happen to my files!!
We are on the same path, wondering the origins of cloud. As usual for my cartoons, I do my own mini research and Google revealed all. Mind you, as you can see from my copy and paste, I didn’t find it that exciting, or couldn’t find a spin to then share with readers…
“The actual term “cloud” borrows from telephony. Telecommunications companies, who until the 1990s primarily offered point-to-point data circuits, began offering Virtual Private Network (VPN) services with a comparable quality of service but at a much lower cost. By switching traffic to balance load as they saw fit, they were able to use their overall network bandwidth more effectively. They used the cloud symbol to mark the point between the infrastructure that was the responsibility of the provider, and where the user took over. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure. The first scholarly use of the term “cloud computing” was in a 1997 lecture by Ramnath Chellappa [1].”