The History of Cloud Computing: 1960s to till date [InfoGraphic]

Cloud computing has been the center for the majority of technology conversations in the past decade. We can trace back the first-ever mention of cloud technology (not in an exact sense) to the 1960s. Later, ARPANET led the foundation of the Internet. Fast forward to 2020, and we have real-life use cases of emerging technologies such as 5G, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc. All this directly or indirectly due to cloud technology.

CMI brings you the history of cloud computing covering the significant events from the 1960s to till date. The infographic addresses the phenomenal advancement that the cloud has seen, particularly in the last two decades.

1961

Late Professor John McCarthy suggested computing would be sold as a utility

1967

IBM Virtualized Operating Systems1969 – ARPANET launched

Early 80s

Network Operating Systems launched

1985

• Storage Tapes with capacity of 200 mega-bytes launched
• Nearly 100000 computers connected to the internet

1991

World wide web launched: 1 million computers connected to the internet

1996

“Cloud” in an internal document in Compaq

1997

Professor Ramnath Chellapa mentions cloud

2002

Amazon Web Services launches public cloud

2005

• “Big Data” starts becoming popular
• OpenNebula research project launched

2006

• Amazon launches Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Sun Microsystems develops ‘data center in a box’ concept

2007

• Database services available on public cloud
• Dropbox founded Cloud storage becomes a service

2008

• Single provider services in multiple regions and data centers
• AWS offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Private Cloud emerges

2009

• Monitoring Services become available
• Edge computing proposed
• NIST provides a definition for cloud computing

2010

• Spot bidding for instances launched by AWS
• AWS adds GPU instances to EC2
• OpenStack open-source software launched
• Microsoft Azure launched

2011

NIST provides a reference architecture for Cloud Computing

2012

• Cisco coins “Fog computing” for using the Edge
• Non-relational database services available

2013

• DevOps for Cloud gains prominence
• Green data centres launched
• Real-time streaming data processed on AWS

2014

• AWS launches Lambda for serverless applications
• European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) Federated Cloud launched
• Container services on public clouds

2015

• Blockchain-as-a-Service launched
• Dell launches Hybrid Cloud System
• Machine learning services on the Cloud

2016

• Cloud-based IoT platform available
• Microservices for Cloud application development

2017

• IBM Cognitive Cloud popularised
• Fog computing (decentralized Cloud) reference architecture defined by OpenFog consortium
• Amazon StepFunctions launched

2018

• Microsoft launches under the sea data-centre
• Google Tensor processing units (TPUs) available on the cloud

2019

• “Hybrid Cloud” came out of the trending phase to the adoption phase.
• AWS launched Amazon Outposts to offer customers a hybrid cloud experience.

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Cloud Evangelist

Cloud Evangelists are Cloud Management Insider in house ambassador for the entire Cloud ecosystem. They are liable for propagating the doctrine of cloud computing and help community members make informed decisions.