Everyone agrees that 2008 was the year that Cloud Computing Hype took off, but here is the “proof” that it was sometime around October 27 2008.
The two graphs show the Google Insights data for search terms related to “cloud computing”, “azure”, “ec2” and “google cloud”. The lower diagram shows the search popularity for each term normalised to a range of 0 to 100. The upper diagram shows the rate of change of these search terms with respect to the overall category of “Computers and Electronics”.
In absolute terms “ec2” had the lions share of search popularity reflecting perhaps its more mature status. “Azure” didn’t appear until September – leading up to its launch on October 27th. To represent Google I had to use a compound term such as “Google Cloud” because “Google” by itself simply swamps the search results and would skew it to unrealistic levels, so it is likely that the Google representation in these “cloud searches” is lower than reality. Using a different term such as “Google App Engine” doesn’t change the conclusions.
The interesting part is the growth in search interest. “Cloud Computing” shows very strong and steady growth throughout the year, peaking around October 27. This is the rate at which search interest was growing, so although search interest will continue to grow in the future, it may never grow as fast as it was in October 2008. Azure may be a late player in the field, but it seems to have sparked a lot of general interest.
