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Chapter 1
Cloud Computing Overview
Yushi Shen Ling Wu
Microsoft Corporation, USA EMC2 Corporation, USA

Yale Li Shaofeng Liu

Microsoft Corporation, USA Microsoft Corporation, USA

Qian Wen
Endronic Corp, USA

ABSTRACT
Cloud Computing is deemed the main trend of IT development for the coming decades, and it is to have
a profound impact on the development of the human society and the world economy. In this chapter,
the authors examine the history of cloud computing, the technical and business models, and the global
implications of cloud computing’s development in the near future. Finally, the market demands for cloud
computing and the foreseeable developmental stages are explored.

THE HISTORY OF CLOUD an American inventor, Douglas Engelbart, did

COMPUTING research in the area of human-computer interac-
tions, which brought the rise of computer mice,
Cloud computing was not born overnight. The links and network machines. During the same
concept of the Cloud in reality had encompassed period, the ARPANet inventor, J.C.R. Licklider,
the entire history of business machines and had foreseen grid computing in the form of global
the Internet. In as early as 1961, when the first network delivery. In the 1990s, grid computing
manned space craft was launched into space, a was very popular and extremely similar to cloud
computer scientist and Turing Award recipient, computing, in that access for computing power
John McCarthy, predicted: “Like the public tele- became as easy as plugging into the electricity
phone networks, the future of computing will be grid. (Baidu Encyclopedia, 2013)
organized in such a way that it will be offered Microsoft had been quite closely related to
much like public resources and utilities. This cloud computing. It could be said that the Cloud
will bring about a whole new industry.” In 1964, operating system was a Microsoft invention.

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4801-2.ch001

Copyright © 2014, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
 Cloud Computing Overview

The former President of Microsoft Platform and ing Cloud) started formally providing services
Services group, Jim Alchin, while working on for small businesses and individual users, where
his Ph.D., at the Georgia Institute of Technology, client applications were run on the established
published a paper titled: “An Architecture for Amazon website servers; Microsoft launched
Reliable Decentralized Systems,” describing the the Red Dog Cloud platform, a predecessor to
world’s first cloud operating system architecture Windows Azure. David Cutler, father to Windows
as “the clouds distributed object-oriented operat- NT, developed the Red-Dog OS Kernel from the
ing system.” Windows operating system kernel. In November
One major contribution due to the birth of 2009, Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform
Cloud computing was that it brought the world a officially began commercial services after a long
brand new business model. Two things that hap- trial period.
pened in the 1990s were considered landmark In 2008, the IT industry had widely recognized
initiatives: First in 1991, CERN broadened the that the biggest challenge to Cloud Computing was
use of the Internet from a limited research tool computing security. Jim Reavis and et al., created a
to its popular uses in all walks of life. Secondly global Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). In January
in 1995, Microsoft’s global Internet data center of 2008, Nicholas Carr published the book “The
realized the concept of cloud, by making its ap- Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to
plications available to hundreds of millions of Google”, where he used an example of switching
users around the world. This “cloud” was the MSN the power station from small to large generators
Internet service, and its associated “terminals” to illustrate the cloud computing concept from
were supported by the simultaneous release of the the various perspectives of history, economics,
Windows 95 operating system. The core applica- technology, development prospects and its impact
tion, connecting this “cloud” and its “terminals,” on society. Numerous articles and publications had
was the IE (Internet Explorer in Windows Plus), come into play to define and give guidance on the
where its home page was http://www.msn.com. subject areas related to cloud computing; the fol-
In 1997, an American professor of Indian lowing being some generally recognized classics:
descent, Ramnath Chellappa, who specialized in
the area of Information Systems, first coined the • Academia: University of California,
term - “Cloud Computing.” A cloud shape was Berkeley, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley
generally used to represent the Internet in textbooks View of Cloud Computing.” This ar-
and design diagrams. In his lectures, Chellappa ticle gave cloud service providers a profit
defined Cloud Computing as: a computing para- formula, ten technical challenges and
digm where the boundaries of computing will be opportunities;
determined by the economic rationale rather than • The Government: U.S. National Bureau
technical limits alone. of Standards (NIST), in “The NIST
From the economic and business model point Definition of Cloud Computing,” presented
of view, Salesforce.com and Amazon were pio- the industry-recognized SPI cloud model,
neers in cloud computing. In 1999, Saleforce.com where the cloud computing service models
introduced the concept of delivering enterprise were classified into three categories: IaaS
applications through its web site. In 2002, Amazon (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (plat-
launched the Amazon Web Services. The year form as a service) and SaaS (software as a
of 2006 was deemed the first year of the modern service). The cloud computing deployment
cloud computing era: Google Docs appeared in model was divided into the public, private
the public view; Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Comput- and hybrid clouds;

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