Goodbye Cloud

Amazon is retiring its first cloud technology – Elastic Compute Cloud. It’s probably true to say that this technology is largely responsible for proliferation of the term ‘the cloud’ and the remote computing and storage revolution that came with it.

I’m struggling to remember when I first heard the term ‘cloud’; I know it made me laugh when it was popularised and people started telling me all about it. Amazon’s cloud was 2006; Voipfone’s cloud was 2004. So there.

According to Wikipedia, the first known use of the term was in an internal document at Compaq, but that just shows how much they know. Telecommunication companies have been drawing clouds on whiteboards for generations and it probably goes back as far a chalk.

But hey-ho, I guess we have to be grateful; popularising cloud services helped remove the fear of off-premise on-line services of all types and Voipfone and the new VoIP industry benefitted from it.

But Voipfone beat them to it. Just sayin’.