The concept of a cloud facilitating applications is by no means new. Those of us who diagrammed network connectivity around 1993 will recall drawing a big puffy cloud symbol in between two local area networks. The cloud represented the mysterious Internet – that mash-up of routers and other items bouncing our packets back and forth through millions of ports, only to reassemble the bytes on the other end into – hopefully — the same item that was sent.
Today, we have dissipated that nebulous cloud symbol to accurately define its contents of firewalls, load-balancing devices, switches, routers and storage devices. As time passed, we even moved beyond the physical layer to embrace a virtual realm, as an obscure organization called VMware began to puncture its way out of EMC and take hold as a processing juggernaut, without the need for more heavy metal. But the cloud evolution was not completed at this time, by any means.