Standard · 11 events
A History of Cloud Computing
1990s
01 eventsMarc 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
03 eventsAmazon 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.
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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.
- Related people
- Ken Thompson
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- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages
2010s
04 eventsMicrosoft 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–).
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Microsoft
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.
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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.
2020s
03 events
Amazon.com Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · Apache License 2.0 (trademark applies) · Commons ↗ 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
Smishra1 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ On 19 July, a faulty update file (Channel File 291) distributed by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor sent an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide into bootloop / blue-screen failure. Airline flights (Delta cancelled about 7,000 flights, with reported losses of US$500 million), hospitals, bank ATMs, emergency response systems, and broadcasters were simultaneously taken down. Total estimated economic loss exceeded US$10 billion, the largest of any single IT outage. Recovery required manual boot into Safe Mode; many organisations needed days to weeks. The incident exposed, at global scale, the supply-chain risk of SaaS security products and the weakness of software validation processes.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Cybersecurity
Daniel Torok / The White House (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (PD-USGov-POTUS) · Commons ↗ On 20 January, the second Trump administration took office and rescinded Biden's AI Executive Order (EO 14110) on day one, pivoting US policy to liberalisation of AI development and 'American AI dominance'. The following day, the White House announced the Stargate Project—a joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to invest up to US$500 billion in data centres, power, and chips over four years. On 23 January, a new executive order on 'Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence' was signed, formalising AI as national strategic infrastructure. Against US-China competition, AI was now positioned as a sovereign asset.
- Related organizations
- OpenAI
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Artificial Intelligence