What is "Cloud Computing"?
© 2009 Ugur Akinci
Technical communicators need to stay abreast of developments in the IT field. “Cloud Computing” is one such development that’s taking the world by storm right now. It’s the way commercial giants like Google, eBay, and Amazon are handling their data and juggling their enormous system loads.
Cloud computing is an example of the increasing movement of compute and data resources onto the Web. But there’s a difference: cloud computing represents a new tipping point for the value of network computing. It delivers higher efficiency, massive scalability, and faster, easier software development. Cloud computing also brings new levels of efficiency and economy to the delivery of IT resources on demand — and in the process, it opens up new business models and market opportunities for developers and enterprises.
Cloud computing offers enormous opportunities for enterprises to cut computing costs and speed time to market for new Web services. Whether they leverage an external cloud, build their own cloud internally, become a cloud services provider, or choose a blend of these options, enterprises can gain advantages that enable them to become much more agile.
The success of massive-scale systems like Google, eBay, and Amazon led to the rise of cloud computing — and each of these companies built their highly customized systems on a huge scale with freely available, freely modifiable opensource software. Today, the dominant software stacks used in cloud computing environments are also open source, and the integrated, optimized, opensource Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python (AMP) stack is the preferred platform for building and deploying new Web applications and services.
Here is a great White Paper on Cloud Computing by Sun Microsystems:
https://www.sun.com/offers/docs/open_cloud.pdf
