Is Cloud Computing Really New? Where did it come from? These are questions that are often unanswered or not covered in all of the buzz that companies like Google, VMware, and Microsoft are putting out there around the Cloud. Let's step back and look at where the Cloud actually came from.

In the beginning, there were great big hulking monstrosities that took up rooms of space, these were called mainframe computers. Mainframes brought us many of the terms used in computing today, along with a model that we are in essence moving back toward because of the efficiencies that it gave us. Out of the Mainframe Era, came the Mini Era. Mini Computers were smaller and less expensive than Mainframes and gave us a more practical approach to compute ownership for businesses and Universities. The PC Revolution hit following this and people became interested in doing more with their workstation than simply using it as a terminal to run applications on the Mainframe or Mini.

Enter the Client/Server Era, as more people had PCs placed on their desktop and more applications were written for Windows, people became interested in networking these machines together. Enter the Client/Server model from Large Enterprises to Small Businesses, companies were wiring their resources together to leverage PCs and have them jointly use File Servers, Printers, and the like.

The Internet had already been around a long time at this point and many University/Government Computers had been linked to the Internet. Now some companies were providing businesses and consumers with the ability to dial-up and use the Internet. As broadband became more popular and more companies began to leverage the Internet as a resource as well, the web became relevant and companies began to need a web presence. Around this time, a group of providers started to offer desktop applications as a service.

The Application Service Providers (ASPs) as they were called began to offer applications using remote access technologies such as Citrix Metaframe (now XenApp) and Microsoft Terminal Services. These technologies worked reasonably well, but weren't adopted for a number of reasons. These reasons included ownership of data, concerns over SLAs, and Licensing/Costs. As the ASPs were in decline, there was a fledgling company introducing a technology that they had been working on for PCs to allow them to run other operating systems in software. That company was VMware and the product was VMware workstation. Interestingly, VMware wasn't the first company to provide virtualization capability, that honor goes to a company once known as Connectix (they created VPC, the Connectix QuickCam which was sold to Logitech). Connectix created VPC a software package for Macintosh computers to allow them to run Microsoft Windows in a Virtual Machine, which ultimately allowed Windows and OS/2 Computers to run Microsoft Windows in a Virtual Machine as well.

Another thread of the story is around Service Oriented Architectures (SoA). The idea of exposing resources as web services making them more easily and uniformly accessible has been around for a while, but building the components, tools, and an infrastructure to support it has been tougher. VMware's push of Virtualization into the Enterprise allowed Applications to be coupled with Operating Systems and become highly portable. This was the push that was needed to make the idea of the Cloud actually function the way it was envisioned. SOAs were now something that could be built and torn down dynamically providing the last component technically to create an efficient cloud model.

Enter Amazon EC2, the first commercial grade public cloud. Why does Amazon have this distinction? There were other companies doing Cloud Computing before Amazon (Salesforce.com on the SaaS side and ProTier/Surgient on the Dynamic Infrastructure Provisioning Side), however none of them brought the web community (including Developers and Admins that needed resources) into the picture the way Amazon did. Amazon promoted an architecture and services, while creating a realistic model for charging for its Cloud Resources (a granular consumption model).

Today, there are many Public Cloud providers and companies offering solutions to create and manage Private Clouds. Public Cloud providers include:
- Amazon AWS and EC2
- Google Web Apps and App Engine
- Microsoft Azure
- RackSpace
Private Cloud Enabling software providers include:
- VMware
- Citrix
- Microsoft
- Surgient
The Cloud is the old reinvented as new based on all of the technological advancements from the proliferation of Virtualization and broadband Internet to the ubiquity of Web Services in a Web 2.0 based Applications. What makes the Cloud likely to be a permanent reality? Companies continue to shift from seeing Servers and IT as a strategic resource to viewing them as another type of facilities based service (this harkens back to Utility Computing). Another important note is that Cloud moves towards the vision that IBM mentioned several years ago (but at the time wasn't practical to implement and still has some significant hurdles, but moves closer and close), that being Autonomic Computing. The idea behind Autonomic Computing was (or for that matter, still is) that systems will become self-healing and will be able to fix, tune, and adjust themselves. This is where things will head, it is just a matter of how long till we get there. What isn't being said, but many are thinking is that this sounds a lot like HAL9000 or Skynet from (The Terminator Movies). Let me put those fears to rest, there is little doubt that there will still be a human somewhere in the loop checking policies or providing approvals and checks.
These are exciting times for the Cloud Computing space and what is happening in that space. Cloud Computing will be the hot place for Application and Infrastructure for the next 5 years at least.