A History of Cloud Computing

Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, incorporated salesforce.com with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. Their base was a rented one-bedroom apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. The company delivered customer-relationship-management (CRM) software through a web browser and pushed the idea under the banner of its launch event of 7 February 2000, 'The End of Software'. Salesforce did not invent hosted software, but it was the most influential force in moving enterprise software from something you installed on your own servers to something you bought as a service—what would later be called Software-as-a-Service.

Related terms

IaaS / PaaS / SaaS

Amazon launched its object storage service, Amazon S3, on 14 March 2006: no upfront cost and no minimum fee, at $0.15 per GB of storage per month and $0.20 per GB transferred. Data could initially be stored only in the US; a European region followed on 6 November 2007. EC2, which rented compute by the hour, entered limited beta on 25 August 2006, and the two became the core of Amazon Web Services. Selling to outsiders the infrastructure Amazon had assembled to sell books would go on to reshape the structure of the IT industry.

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Amazon

Related terms

IaaS / PaaS / SaaS

Appears in

A General History of Information Technology

Google unveiled App Engine at its Campfire One event on the evening of 7 April 2008: developers wrote application code, and Google's infrastructure ran it. By hiding the OS and the servers entirely and exposing only the application layer, it became a defining implementation of what would be called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The preview was capped at the first 10,000 developers who signed up, with free quotas of 500MB storage, 200M CPU megacycles a day, and 10GB of bandwidth a day. Python was the only supported language at launch; Java arrived in April 2009, and App Engine did not graduate from preview to a fully supported product until November 2011. Together with the slightly earlier Heroku, it shaped the PaaS line that runs on to Cloud Foundry and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Related organizations

Google

Related terms

IaaS / PaaS / SaaS

Microsoft commercialised the cloud computing service it had announced at PDC in October 2008: on 1 February 2010, Windows Azure went generally available in 21 countries with full SLAs behind it (the rename to Microsoft Azure followed on 3 April 2014). Following AWS, it leaned on integration with existing enterprise software (Active Directory, Office, SQL Server) and grew rapidly; by 2020 it held roughly 20% of the worldwide market, second only to AWS. The central business of Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO (2014–).

Related organizations

Microsoft Corporation

Appears in

A History of Microsoft

On 15 March 2013, Solomon Hykes of the PaaS startup dotCloud showed Docker to the public for the first time in a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon US in Santa Clara, titled 'The future of Linux Containers'. Docker did not invent containers. cgroups, which enforce resource limits, were begun in 2006 by Google's Paul Menage and Rohit Seth as 'process containers' and landed in mainline Linux 2.6.24 in 2008; namespaces, which provide isolation, had been added incrementally since 2.4.19 in 2002. Early Docker did not touch either directly — it drove LXC, and only replaced it with its own libcontainer in version 0.9 in March 2014. Docker's contribution was to bundle that existing machinery behind a Dockerfile, an image distribution model and a usable CLI, putting it within reach of ordinary developers. The first tagged release, v0.1.0, came on 26 March 2013; dotCloud renamed itself Docker, Inc. on 29 October 2013; version 1.0 shipped in June 2014.

Related terms

Container

On 10 June 2014, Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure at Google, announced Kubernetes as an open-source container manager in a post titled 'An update on container support on Google Cloud Platform'. The repository's opening commit—Joe Beda's 'First commit'—is dated 6 June, and the design work had begun in the autumn of 2013 with Craig McLuckie, Joe Beda and Brendan Burns. Kubernetes is not an open-sourced Borg: the project's own blog says 'Kubernetes traces its lineage directly from Borg', built by former Borg developers who carried over its best ideas while fixing pain points users had identified—and the announcement post itself cited Omega, not Borg, as the internal system. Version 1.0 was declared at OSCON on 21 July 2015, and on the same day Google donated Kubernetes to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under the Linux Foundation. AWS, GCP and Azure all now offer managed Kubernetes, making it the de facto standard for declarative cluster management.

Related organizations

Google

Related terms

Container · Kubernetes

AWS introduced Lambda alongside re:Invent 2014: code run as individual functions, billed only for compute in 100-millisecond units and for the number of requests. It was a preview at this point—Node.js was the only supported language, memory ran from 128 MB to 1 GB, a function could execute for at most 60 seconds, and it was offered in just three regions (US East N. Virginia, US West Oregon, EU Ireland). Production readiness came on 9 April 2015, together with Java support and SNS triggers. The 'serverless' model, in which servers are not exposed at all, took hold from here; Google Cloud Functions, Cloudflare Workers, and Vercel Functions followed, and between them they became the mainstream server-side shape of modern web development.

Related organizations

Amazon

Related terms

Serverless

Amazon Web Services unveiled Amazon Bedrock—a unified API providing access to multiple foundation models (Anthropic's Claude, AI21 Jurassic, Stability's Stable Diffusion, Amazon Titan, and others). Customers could invoke foundation models serverlessly without removing their data from AWS. As a counter to the Microsoft–Azure–OpenAI exclusivity, Bedrock was AWS's strategic statement of a 'many models, one platform' approach. Combined with the up-to-US$4-billion investment in Anthropic in September 2023, Bedrock became the flagship of the multi-model camp.

Related organizations

Anthropic · Amazon

Related terms

Foundation Model · Serverless

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At 04:09 UTC on 19 July, a faulty content update (Channel File 291) that CrowdStrike shipped to its Falcon Sensor put Windows machines worldwide into blue screens and bootloops. What failed was not a kernel driver update but a data file the driver reads to define detection logic — that distinction is the heart of the incident. The figure of 8.5 million affected devices is Microsoft's estimate, which it put at less than one percent of all Windows machines. Aviation, hospitals, bank ATMs, emergency call handling and broadcast went down together; Delta Air Lines cancelled around 7,000 flights over five days and put its own losses at more than US$500 million. On economic damage, Parametrix estimated US$5.4 billion in direct losses to Fortune 500 companies excluding Microsoft; no authoritative global total exists. Recovery meant manual Safe Mode work on each machine, plus BitLocker recovery keys where drives were encrypted. The incident pushed the design question of EDR kernel privilege onto the public agenda.

Related organizations

Microsoft Corporation

Related terms

Kernel

Appears in

A General History of Information Technology · A History of Cybersecurity

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