hw4. Prof Hammoud. Cloud Computing

History of cloud computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand access of IT resources, such as data storage, physical/virtual
servers throughout the internet with pay-per-use pricing. The history of cloud computing dates
back to 1960s, when DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funded MIT to invent
a technology which allowed two or more people to use the same computer simultaneously. The major
breakthrough in the cloud computing was made in 2002, when Amazon launched its web-based retail
services.

Cloud computing today

The benefits of cloud computing includes cost-effectiveness (as one pays only for the services
provided), almost unlimited storage, increased speed, and many other features. Nowadays,
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is now the most popular cloud service provider, owning nearly
one-third of global market share. The other most popular cloud computing service providers are
Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud.

Economic model of cloud computing

"Cloud economics is the study of cloud computing's costs and benefits and the economic principles
that underpin them. As a discipline, it explores key questions for businesses: What is the return
on investment (ROI) of migrating to the cloud or switching current cloud providers." (Source: vmware.com)
Cloud economics requires three elements: benchmarking (calculating how much does the current data center cost),
cloud costs (estimating the new data center's costs and offers, private/public/hybrid clouds), and migration
costs (how much additional budget is required to migrate the data from the old database to the new one).

References

1. https://www.ibm.com/topics/cloud-computing
2. https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing
3. https://www.dataversity.net/brief-history-cloud-computing
4. https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/cloud-service-providers
5. https://www.vmware.com/topics/cloud-economics