Cloud Computing

Nowadays, we constantly hear buzzword, “Cloud Computing”. We will try to dig this term the way I understood in a hope that someone might find it useful. :)

Before proceeding further lets limit the scope of this article. We are not going to debate if there exists cloud computing or not…

If you have any comments and suggestions feel free to drop your comments.

+ What is Cloud computing?

IMO, Cloud computing is a IT abstraction on internet that provides on-demand provisioning of different resources based on SLA.

From user’s/customer’s perspective, it is a black box where we deploy our application and forget managing required IT infrastructure for our app to run that might contain application services, storage services, processing/computing power, bandwidth etc.

So we don’t need to worry about CAPEX in future. This will allow us to concentrate more on our business rather attending IT infrastructure, it may be software or hardware based on our application specific needs under cloud computing environment.

In order to estimate popularity of “Cloud Computing”, we can look at its Google trends. Statically, we can clearly observe “Cloud Computing" interest with exponential increase in the trend.

+ Why do we need Cloud computing?

It is bit tricky. Generally in Information Technology industry, new technologies arrive constantly. They start to provide significant advantages over old technologies. So most of the businesses start to accommodate with these changes into their business models and that will create its demand and eventually different vendors come into play to provide these services. Hope that explains a bit about it.

+ Where it is used and who provides cloud computing services?

There are many services available on internet. Few of them are,

• See Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and S3 at Amazon Web services http://aws.amazon.com/
• See http://www.salesforce.com/
• Google docs is one more cloud computing service. They provide online office services. See http://docs.google.com/
• MS has also entered into this with there MS Office Live offerings. See http://workspace.live.com However,  IMO, it is not truly cloud computing.