SHARE With this week’s $500 million acquisition by application delivery controller supplier F5 Networks Inc. of cloud-native network and security provider Volterra Inc., F5 aims to create an edge services platform for businesses and service providers to deliver and secure “cloud” apps at scale. I put the term cloud in quotes because it’s the changing definition of cloud that drove this acquisition. As an industry, we’ve been talking about cloud for decades, but the reality is that cloud has gone through multiple evolutionary phases. The first wave of cloud was hosted computing where organizations would run critical applications off their premises in a highly security environment, optimized for performance. Even once these infrastructure-as-a-service services came to market, most businesses took advantage of them by performing a “lift and shift” of legacy apps. That provided cost advantages, but the application performed essentially the same.