Cloud Computing.
Let's say you're an executive at a large corporation. Your particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying computers for everyone isn't enough -- you also have to purchase software or software licenses to give employees the tools they require. Whenever you have a new hire, you have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go to sleep on your huge pile of money every night.
Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing.
In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.
There's a good chance you've already used some form of cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, then you've had some experience with cloud computing. Instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a Web e-mail account remotely. The software and storage for your account doesn't exist on your computer -- it's on the service's computer cloud.
A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider.) A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.
Applications in the cloud: this is what almost everyone has already used in the form of gmail, yahoo mail, wordpress.com (hosting this blog), the rest of google apps, the various search engines, wikipedia, encyclopedia britannica, etc. Some company hosts an application in the internet that many users sign-up for and use without any concern about where, how, by whom the compute cycles and storage bits are provided. The service being sold (or offered in ad-sponsored form) is a complete end-user application.
Platforms in the cloud: this is the newest entry where an application platform is offered to developers in the cloud. Developers write their application to a more or less open specification and then upload their code into the cloud where the app is run magically somewhere, typically being able to scale up automagically as usage for the app grows. Examples are Mosso, Google App Engine, and Force.com. The service being sold is the machinery that funnels requests to an application and makes the application tick.
Infrastructure in the cloud: this is the most general offering that Amazon has pioneered and where RightScale offers its management platform. Developers and system administrators obtain general compute, storage, queuing, and other resources and run their applications with the fewest limitations. This is the most powerful type of cloud in that virtually any application and any configuration that is fit for the internet can be mapped to this type of service. Of course it also requires more work on the part of the buyer, which is where RightScale comes in to help with set-up and automation.
Tags: Networking
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