The Cloud
What actually is the cloud and how can you use it? Let’s first demystify it a bit…
The Cloud in computing terms is simply a set of computers somewhere in the world (that you don’t need to know about) that are accessed through the internet. Yep, despite all the hoo-ha that’s really what it is! Ok, so how the technology behind Cloud works is a lot more complex, but you don’t need to know about that!
Why is it called “The Cloud”? Well that’s actually very simple too. Engineer Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider drew a diagram in the 1960’s that showed how two sites connected their computer networks. He was only interested in the two sites themselves not what happened in the middle, so he drew a squiggly shape to represent all the kit and networks that connected the two sites.
The squiggle happened to look a bit like a cloud so it became the icon of choice for network planners when they wanted to represent a section of nework that they didn’t need to know details about.
Jump forward to 2006 when Amazon released AWS, it’s first “cloud computing” service. Marketers got hold of the term as a way of presenting services in an appealing way and the rest is history…