What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is becoming the dominant design style for new applications and for the adaptation of a large number of existing applications, facilitating and making more flexible the deployments of infrastructures, tools and components for the agile development of applications. and services

 A hybrid cloud is an ICT environment where one or several public and private clouds are combined with one or several local ICT environments or "OnPremise", in a way that allows data, applications and services to be shared transparently and safely among all. these environments

According to the eighth meaning of the Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the RAE, the cloud is a "space for storage and processing of data and files located on the Internet, which can be accessed by the user from any device". Probably this definition is not very precise today in terms of generalizing the location on the Internet of this "storage and processing space". In fact, Gartner, which also defines cloud computing as "a computing style in which scalable and elastic IT capabilities are delivered in the form of a service using Internet technologies," has expanded and clarified its glossary of terms, reallocating this same acceptance to "Public Cloud Computing". In addition, it has added new terms of "Private cloud computing" (of which it says that "it is a form of cloud computing used by a single organization or that ensures that one organization is completely isolated from others") and "Computing in hybrid cloud ", which he describes as" coordinated and policy-based provisioning of services, use and management through a mix of internal and external cloud services. "

The origin of cloud computing has its germ in virtualization, a layer of abstraction that added on the assets and physical resources of Information Technology (IT) that allows masking its physical nature to users. In traditional virtualization systems, through this layer of abstraction, original systems were "partitioned" into equivalent sub-systems, or else several "logical instances" of them were created. The first virtualization patents for x86 architectures (the most widespread today) were registered by VMWare in the late 1990s and began their peak in 2000.

These first virtualization technologies were evolving towards business architectures that allowed them to separate "logical assets" from their "physical containers". Gradually, they began to "virtualize" the less critical components of IT infrastructures and corporate information systems, to gradually virtualize the rest of assets and information systems. This virtualization not only eliminated the dependencies of the hardware software, but also facilitated, made flexible and streamlined all operations related to infrastructures. Thus, it allowed a better use of physical resources by "multiplexing" several virtual systems on the available physical resources, and improved availability and security by allowing virtual instances to be relocated automatically in case of failure in other physical resources.

The first public platform for cloud computing emerged around 2006, when Amazon began working on an electronic commerce platform with the aim of using it as a collaboration platform with other companies in its sector. A few years later, in 2010, Microsoft, would develop and market its own product, Azure. Also, that same year, thanks to a collaboration between NASA and RackSpace, an Open Source initiative known as OpenStack was launched, which today is considered a de facto standard on which many of the computer technologies are based. in current cloud.

Virtualization and the emergence of these technologies gave way to traditional providers of Internet services to adopt the use of cloud computing software to increase their catalog of services and become application providers. This led to an exponential increase in the demand for workloads as they were able to industrialize, speed up and facilitate the massive provision of IT services to their customers through the Internet.

In this way, the information systems began to transform to adapt to this new type of architecture and began to scale horizontally in a massive way, dividing and cloning the components of the information systems among multiple virtual assets. As these virtual assets were distributed and segregated among multiple physical assets, the reliability and availability of physical infrastructures lost importance due to this relocation process. The gradual inc