Keynote: A Brief History of the Cloud from Servers to VMs to Buildpacks to Cloud Native Containers

Keynote: A Brief History of the Cloud from Servers to VMs to Buildpacks to Cloud Native Containers - Dan Kohn, Executive Director, Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Over the last two decades, the fundamental building blocks of application delivery has evolved. It started with non-virtualized servers from Sun, moved to virtual machines from VMWare and AWS (on first private and then public clouds, the latter being called Infrastructure-as-a-Service), and then continued to buildpacks on Platform-as-a-Service offerings such as Heroku. We’ll review this evolution, and the subsequent one toward open source approaches to VMs, IaaS, and PaaS like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Native computing is defined as orchestrated containers of microservices. We’ll bring our history up to the current day by reviewing the extraordinary excitement around containers as the building block for modern applications and discuss some of the advantages of a cloud native architecture, including isolation, avoiding lock-in, scalability, agility and maintainability, efficiency and resiliency.

Dan Kohn is executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

About Dan Kohn
Dan Kohn leads the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Dan previously served as CTO of several startups, including Spreemo, a healthcare marketplace, and Shopbeam, a shoppable ads company. Earlier, he was a general partner at Skymoon Ventures, a $70 million seed-stage venture capital firm that created startups in semiconductors and telecom infrastructure. He also helped create and launch the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative.

Dan helped manage a number of telecoms firms controlled by Craig McCaw and started his career as founder and CEO of NetMarket, one of the first Internet companies. In 1994, he led the development of the first music store on the web, including conduction the first secure commercial transaction, deploying the first commercial database-backed website, and implementing the first shopping cart.