Standard · 8 events
A History of Cloud Computing
1990s
Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, founded Salesforce.com to deliver customer-relationship-management (CRM) software through a web browser. With the slogan 'No Software', it became the first major example of replacing the install-it-on-your-own-server model of enterprise software with what would later be called Software-as-a-Service.
2000s
Amazon launched its object storage service S3 (Simple Storage Service). The compute service EC2 followed in August. Together, Amazon Web Services—AWS—became the de facto start of what would be called 'the cloud'. The idea of opening to outside customers the infrastructure built internally for selling books would, over the next decade and a half, restructure the entire IT industry.
Google launched App Engine, a service on which developers wrote application code that ran on Google's infrastructure. By hiding the OS and the virtual machine entirely and exposing only the application layer, it became an early implementation of what would be called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk descend from this line.
A systems programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson (the UNIX author). Starting from frustration with C++ build times and complexity, it combined garbage collection, lightweight concurrency via goroutines, and a deliberately simple syntax. Most of the cloud-native infrastructure of the 2010s—Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus—is written in Go.
2010s
Microsoft commercialised the cloud computing service it had announced in 2008, branded Windows Azure (renamed Microsoft Azure in 2014). Following AWS, it leaned on integration with existing enterprise software (Active Directory, Office, SQL Server) and grew rapidly; by the late 2010s it was the world's second-largest cloud provider. The central business of Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO (2014–).
Solomon Hykes at the PaaS startup dotCloud (later Docker, Inc.) released Docker—a wrapper around the cgroups and namespaces facilities that the Linux kernel already had, exposing them through a usable CLI and a Dockerfile. Lighter than virtual machines, capable of unifying development and production environments, the concept of a 'container' became accessible to a vastly broader population of developers. Together with Kubernetes (2014), Docker became the de facto operational standard of cloud-native systems through the late 2010s.
Google open-sourced Kubernetes, a container orchestrator designed from the experience of its internal Borg system (a cluster manager it had run for years). Donated to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under the Linux Foundation in 2015. By the 2020s, Kubernetes was the de facto standard for managing fleets of containers declaratively, integrated into AWS, GCP, and Azure alike.
AWS introduced Lambda—execution of code on a per-function basis, billed only for the time and the number of requests. The serious start of the 'serverless' model, in which servers are not exposed at all. Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and much of the server-side topology of modern web development descend from it.