Introduction to cloud technologies

The term cloud computing, or the simple alternative cloud, is not missing from any tech enthusiast's or Information Technology (IT) professional's vocabulary these days. You don't even have to be involved in IT at all to hear (or even use) the term cloud relatively often. Today's computing landscape is changing at a rapid pace, and the pinnacle of this change is the cloud and the technologies behind it. According to the literature, the term cloud computing was used for the first time in 1996, inside a business plan from Compaq (https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/10/31/257406/who-coined-cloud-computing/).

Cloud computing is a relatively old concept, even though it was not referred to as this term right from the beginning. Cloud computing is a computing model that was used from the early days of computing. Back in the 1950s, for example, there were mainframe computers that were accessed from different terminals. This model...