With Google’s launch of Apps Engine last week, Cloud Computing again became a buzzword.  Everyone is seeing and talking about everything to be in the cloud in the near future.  But there are still so many clouds over cloud computing that there is no common understanding about it.  Even the IT folks swear by Cloud Computing when it comes to defining it.  So, what is cloud computing and what it does?

Let’s First See What Cloud And Cloud Computing Is not and Cannot …

• Software-as-a-Service is not Cloud Computing
• All types of Remote Computing is not Cloud Computing
• Everything cannot be in the cloud
• Customers cannot have a separate cloud

Then What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing, according to Gartner is,

a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers

This means that cloud computing is a kind of highly scalable, multi-tenant, IT-related capability provided for storage and processing of data delivered to customers across the Internet as a service.  The customers can access these services from anywhere on-demand independent of location of the underlying infrastructure.

This takes me to another buzz term, PaaS or Platform as a Service.  Is PaaS Cloud Computing?  Yes and No both.  Yes, because it enables on-demand computing ability.  No because PaaS is a collection of development and deployment tools, languages and APIs used to build, deploy and run applications in the cloud.  In this way, PaaS comes across as a middleware between the web application and Cloud Computing resources.

What are the limitations of  Cloud Computing

Cloud computing with all its benefits also has its own set of limitations which restrict enterprises to move their applications in the cloud.  Some of these limitations are:

• Customization is nearly impossible
• Scalability problems with Sequential processing
• Data privacy issues because of the common resources
• Lack of high speed Internet connectivity
• Reliability problems related to SLAs.  Alex Iskold wrote a great post on cloud computing which also mentions about the SLAs for cloud computing and what to expect.
• Cost surpasses traditional hosting in case of very high usage

Who All Are In The Race Of Providing Cloud Computing

Here is the list of service providers making cloud computing resources available for developers

Amazon is the first one to provide true cloud computing resources with Amazon Web Services.  The offerings include S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), SimpleDB and SQS (Simple Queuing Service) making it a full set of services for cloud computing.

Google launched its cloud computing offering named Apps engine last week.  Comes across both as cloud computing resource as well as Platform as a Service for developing, deploying and running applications.  See our previous post to know more about Google Apps Engine and what does it offer.

IBM has announced its cloud computing offering named Blue Cloud which is expected to launch very soon.  The Blue Cloud is a distributed computing architecture based on an open-source project called Hadoop.  It is built on IBM’s own software Tivoli and hardware BladeCenters and System z mainframes.

Joyent uses its software called Accelerator to offer cloud computing service which can run web applications written in PHP, Java, Python and even Ruby on Rails with high scalability.  The web application set up is open and standards based which provides high degree of portability to other systems.

Nirvanix offers Storage in the Clound with its service called Storage Delivery Network.  Nirvanix’s offering is very similar to any CDN which stores, delivers and processes storage requests in the best (closest) network location in its global cluster of storage nodes.

Elastra’s Cloud Server is a combination Amazon Web Services and Elastra’s various proprietary tools and services.  It includes Cloud Cluster templates and Cloud Designer for database system architecture, Elastic Computing Name Service for automated deployment on EC2 and a web based front end for managing the service.

Red Hat also provides cloud computing using Amazon Web Services on the open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system which uses instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service.

Cloud Computing, till now, has been used by startups mostly barring few established services and enterprises.  However, it is making it in-roads into the enterprises by offering easy scalability and reliability; perhaps beginning with smaller applications.  The future of computing is surely on cloud 9!!

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