These days we keep on hearing that computing is moving towards “Clouds” and how this will make headaches and pains associated with infrastructure and server management thing of the past.. Let us try to look at what really is cloud computing
What is cloud computing ?
Cloud computing refers to term where in a company where instead of running software , applications on in house servers or storing data locally , are doing it on a third party resources which are being termed as clouds.
So what are these clouds ?
Clouds are thousands and thousands of computers connected via internet to each other and these computers are shared by companies to host their application and manage data.
One of the best examples of the cloud computing is salesforce.com which had been working on this concept since long. Another recent example is New York Times which has provided fully searchable access to its 1851 to 1922 archive—more than 15 million articles. This has been achieved without hosting any application on its own servers. They are using Amazon’s Cloud Computing service.
Google’s business suite launched in 2007 has 0.5 million clients and it uses the power of cloud computing by offering the companies and individuals business applications hosted over internet.
Now this would give you a fair idea of what is cloud computing and what is achievable with this.
Some other players who are in the field of offering cloud computing services are
a) Amazon’s cloud computing
b) Google App Engine
c) Sun Microsystems
These companies are now providing cloud services to individuals and companies. One has to sign up then they are given access to their space in the clouds. The developers or application management team can connect to these clouds through various tools and deploy their application.
The price ranges on how much bandwidth is used and what is the traffic on the site.
The concept behind companies selling the cloud computing is that your infrastructure is not always loaded 100% . So during the times US has its peak load, Europe is just waking up and Hong Kong is sleeping.
When Hong Kong is utilizing 100% load, the peak load is fallen 80% in US.
In this way the resources can be managed much more effectively if they are being managed by a central vendor.
Advantages : One of the biggest advantages of cloud that I see for small to medium sized companies , they do not have to rely on in house server management.
Another advantage is that sudden spikes in load or traffic can be handled by cloud servers with companies having to manage extra servers or anything. They only need to pay for this extra load.
The offerings are reasonably priced for one to try out and google offers free version as of now.
Limitations : Now all versions of hardware have been supported by clouds . Amazon is now offering the open source web server tomcat on its cloud.
Google is also offering deployment of java applications. More information of google app engine supporting java can be found here. (I think it is free)
Sun Microsystems has also has a very goof offering on the clouds. They offer Virtualization in the cloud and also prevent vendor lockout.
Update : I have added a post to demonstrate First Step working with Cloud Computing
