Ten years ago, you could go to www.google.com and get results. You didn't exactly know where the Google web server was. Google was running a number of server farms, and you didn't care which server provided your request. For that matter, you might search on something else five seconds later and hit a different machine.
In that sense, the cloud has been a reality for years. If we count Telnet and email, it's been a reality for decades.
Yet, in another sense, the cloud era is very new. Now, we get to build the cloud-based services for ourselves. Like Google spread its work over 10,000 computers, we testers may, in some ways, spread our work out.
This brings two very different ideas to the masses. The first is virtualization, which allows us to combine the services of many computers onto one physical machine. The second is distributed computing, harnessing a large number of computers as one.
In that sense, the cloud has been a reality for years. If we count Telnet and email, it's been a reality for decades.
Yet, in another sense, the cloud era is very new. Now, we get to build the cloud-based services for ourselves. Like Google spread its work over 10,000 computers, we testers may, in some ways, spread our work out.
This brings two very different ideas to the masses. The first is virtualization, which allows us to combine the services of many computers onto one physical machine. The second is distributed computing, harnessing a large number of computers as one.
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