This talk traces the history of virtualization and cloud-native technologies from their roots in early mainframe computing to today’s highly distributed, containerized systems. We’ll examine key technological milestones—like the rise of hypervisors, the emergence of containers, and the standardization brought by Kubernetes—and how each shifted both software architecture and business strategy.

Alongside the tech, we’ll explore changes in methodology: from ITIL and data center ops to DevOps and GitOps. We’ll connect these shifts to broader economic and industry trends, showing how infrastructure decisions have shaped the growth of cloud-first companies and platforms.

Anchored in technical insight, the talk also weaves in references from the times—like how AWS launched the same year YouTube sold to Google, or how the container revolution paralleled the rise of mobile apps and CI/CD pipelines.

If you're curious about how we got from bare metal to the cloud-native landscape we navigate today, this is your roadmap.