Foundation for design – the cloud is economic, not technical

Contrary to what most believe, the cloud is not a technological innovation; it is an economic one. Although the cloud is based on virtualization technology, virtualization is not a new technology. Virtualization has been around for more than 50 years, starting with IBM mainframes in the early 60s, namely the CP-40. For decades, we have been trying to match better hardware and system utilization to the task or workload we are working to complete. Virtualization started with scientists and mathematicians from both IBM labs and MIT trying to perform complex calculations. They were trying to get more work done and, at the time, one task was limited to one system. IBM came up with the idea of virtualizing memory, which creates separate instances and completing more tasks could take place in the same amount of time. The birth of virtualization happened around 1963, with the first commercially available virtualized system going to market...