Technology, Money & Questions

Cloud computing is the next big thing in the information industry. The term cloud computing has very quickly grown from a little known buzz word into one of the hottest topics of the information industry. In June 2009, a study conducted by VersionOne found that 41% senior IT professionals actually don't know what cloud computing means and two-thirds of senior financial professionals are confused by the very young technology, highlighting the nature of the technology.

I should say, I'm quite a bit attracted towards cloud computing. The concept of cloud computing is very promising and it really seems to be the next big thing. So, I've decided to dedicate a chunk of my blogging time to write articles on cloud computing. You will see more of cloud computing when compared to other streams.

Today lets talk about what cloud computing really is.

According to me, cloud computing as a jargon is very new to the information industry whereas the concept behind cloud computing is always present here. In its raw form cloud computing can be understood as a way of "Abstraction", abstraction of resources, infrastructure, platform.

This perception of abstraction isn't new to us, we've abstraction through out the network via the TCP/IP concept. We never cared about where or how the data flow via the internet, the TCP/IP abstraction took care of that. So, I would say that TCP/IP abstraction is the first kind of cloud we've around networking. Second, the WWW [World Wide Web] provides a clean and clear abstraction over documents. Now, we're ready to take the abstraction to the next level thus connecting billions of people and their resources together via clouds.

What does the emerging clouds primarily abstract?

The emerging clouds abstracts infrastructure complexities of servers, applications, data and heterogeneous platforms.

What is cloud computing anyway?

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm based on the use of shared IT resources, dynamically allocated to specific users and tasks and accessed as a service via an application programming interface (API). Cloud computing enables convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources [the resource may be networks, servers, storage, applications, and services], along with rapid provisioning capability. The resources can also be released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Cloud computing, works on the internet platform and uses central remote servers to maintain data and host applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation on their physical machines. Users deploy applications to the cloud, which acts like a virtual data center. The physical cloud resources may reside in a number of locations, the details of which are not typically known to the service's users. Cloud resources are provided on an as-needed basis, and delivered by IP-based connectivity.

This is just an overview of what cloud computing means. We've lots of ground to cover. Let's dig more about cloud computing in my forth coming articles.