About Cloud Computing

If you are in the IT world, you'd probably heard about Cloud Computing, which is apparently a buzzword frequently mentioned by Gartner since 2007, and spread over the global IT industry nowadays. It is emerging at the convergence of 3 major trends nowadays, namely service orientation, virtualization and standardization of computing through the Internet.

Gartner defines Cloud Computing as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. This term derives from the normal practice in network drawing whereby the Internet is always presented as a cloud symbol in the diagram.

With Cloud Computing, the computing resources will be consolidated from various data center locations linked up together in the cloud, and will be delivered to consumers on a service subscription basis, allow access from anywhere and provide economies of scale. The concept is similar to utility services that we all are familiar with, such as the electricity.

Consumers of Cloud Computing services purchase the required computing capacity on-demand, and are not generally concerned with the underlying technologies used to achieve the increase in server capability. The types of IT services that can be provided through a cloud are wide-reaching, and have now expanded past web applications to include storage, raw computing, or access to any number of specialized services.

Notable Cloud Computing service providers include:

• Amazon - Amazon Web Services
• Google - Apps engine
• IBM - Blue Cloud
• Nirvanix - Storage Delivery Network

Redhat and Elastra also provide cloud computing based on the Amazon Web Services.

To date, there are still a lot of confusion around this buzzword, and Gartner has clarified the following to be myths about Cloud Computing and should not be taken as true:

• Myth No. 1: Cloud computing is an architecture or an infrastructure.
• Myth No. 2: Every vendor will have a different cloud.
• Myth No. 3: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the cloud.
• Myth No. 4: Cloud computing is a brand new revolution.
• Myth No. 5: All remote computing is cloud computing.
• Myth No. 6: The Internet and the Web are the cloud.
• Myth No. 7: Everything will be in the cloud.
• Myth No. 8: The cloud eliminates private networks.

Cloud Computing is a promising approach for highly scalable integrated computing service. It is still in its early stage now, and might take a few years to be matured.