The Cloud Joke

In my last post, I went through a VERY brief history of computing looking into virtualization. The lesson is, it's been around forever.

In the late 90's, early 2000's, Citrix was the darling of the industry abstracting application delivery through a combination of their presentation server technology and terminal services. Although it wasnt really virtualization, it planted a seed in enterprises across the globe - "What if we could abstract even more?"

In the mid 2000's virtualization became popular and widely adopted with VMware advancing their platform for Server OS virtualization. VMware and the technology took off sending shockwaves throughout the technology industry. Apps, OS's and databases were being rewritten to take advantage of the platform so that companies to could better utilize their physical infrastructure.

Not too long ago, containers were sexy, and to some extent, they still are. Containers enable a microservices architecture by running applications and their required libraries/OS dependencies into segmented runtime environment.

OpenStack

Today, cloud is king. Enterprises around the world are going "all-in" on cloud shedding their datacenters and willfully handing their computer and storage management over to cloud providers.