Did amazon.com invent cloud computing?

I was the recipient of an interesting idea at the local CloudCamp un-conference.

Amazon.com offers their EC2 virtual servers. At first, it was offered with no guarantees: yeah you can run things on EC2 servers, but they could crash at any time. It was cheap, but not reliable. What was a developer to do?

The price for amazon.com's EC2 service was too low to ignore, so developers did what they always do: they built software around the problems. For cheap servers that could crash at any time, that meant building software that was tolerant of servers "disappearing" at any moment.

That's a big part of cloud computing. With "the cloud", a server can drop off-line at any time. Your application must continue. The initial level of reliability of EC2 was low, and forced developers to think about portable processes, processes that could hop from server to server and continue the work. This idea (along with others) made cloud computing possible.

Prior to the idea of portable processes (and crashing servers), applications were built on the model of "the server is reliable". After EC2, software was built with the idea of "the server is not guaranteed". It's quite a change.

So we may have amazon.com to thank for the cloud.