.NET Renaissance: Cloud Computing - How this idea emerged?!

Microsoft's Windows Azure Platform is a cloud platform offering hosted in Microsoft Data centers that provides wide range of useful services (Operating system and set of developer services) which can be consumed by both on-premises and on-cloud applications.

Cloud is nothing but just the internet and cloud computing refers to internet based computing. This is something didn’t appear suddenly, this technology is evolving from a long time frame. Basically cloud platforms utilize virtualization to share dynamically scalable resources (hardware / software) over Internet based on demand as a service.

A technical definition from Wikipedia: "a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.

How it evolved or How this idea emerged?

Let’s look back the history how this got evolved. Data Center comes into existence as for all major IT companies for their business continuity (IT operation to up and running 24/7) through reliable infrastructure. Many companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM etc having their own datacenters to manage their IT during 2000’s. But after dot-com bubble, the usage of the servers in the Data center is pretty low (80% unutilized) and most of the time the server computing is idle and not being used fully. But companies invested huge money in building the Data centers. It forced them to utilize / better leverage the data centers for new business opportunities.

Once Virtualization also emerge which helps in better hardware/software management and help running the data centers efficiently. By making the server farms virtualized, it helps a lot in cost savings with more server availability and maintenance. This helps them to increase / add the capabilities on fly by re-using the existing hardware to maximum utility.

Amazon is one of the pioneers in utilizing their data centers to expose their servers computing power to public through Web Service around 2004. I am also one of the members of the Amazon Web Services which got very popular in quite a bit of time and got huge user base for the same. To my opinion, most of the key services in cloud computing came from Amazon!

Check here - http://aws.amazon.com/products/?ref_=pe_undef for all their key products as of now across cloud computing, data storage, networking, monitoring, messaging etc…