What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.
A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access).
You could have public cloud, community one, private, a hybrid one and you probably think that you've never used it, but think again - Zoho, Google apps, online storage for you files, online backup system, even GMAIL and HOTMAIL, Skype, Google Voice, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picassa, YouTube, Flickr, and torrent sites - they all are using this paradigm.
Cloud services free businesses and consumers from having to invest in hardware or install software on their devices. They reduce maintenance and hardware upgrading needs; because the solutions are all Web-based, even older computers can be used to access cloud services.
For mobile workers especially, cloud computing provides incredible flexibility: professionals can work from any computing device anywhere as long as they have access to the Web. It also makes collaboration easier especially for virtual team.
And with all the positive sides of the technology, you also get the downside: you need to have an Internet access, the service should have 99.9% uptime, security issues, and how reliable the service you are using is in terms of could it go out of business soon and leave you without your entire collection of pictures, files, work, music, and etc.
The other major problem is different clouds. You can use Google, Amazon's cloud, Microsoft's one, and a thousand more - for every service, software or job you need, but there is no interoperability between them.
And the world of cloud computing APIs has been constantly evolving since this highly-scalable architecture first gained attention less than five years ago, but it is an area with great expectations and little commanding consensus of architecture - so far. There is a lack of consistency in cloud APIs. There is also no long term vision about where the paradigm is going.
IBM published the Open Cloud Manifesto, a document that was supposed to lay the tracks for openness and interoperability in cloud computing but which was rejected by the industry's major players - Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and Microsoft. The whole paradigm needs not only standards compliance today, but also a unified approach to evolving those standards and a way to deal with future problems.
When YuvalShavit asked Steven Yi, Microsoft’s director of product management for the Azure Services Platform, how he thought the cloud manifesto should have been drafted, and what Microsoft would like to see in it, his answered: “I don't necessarily think there needs to be a manifesto as long as we're delivering on customer needs” and interoperating with other services, he said. During their talk Yi emphasizes also that Azure is standards-compliant and that the company is constantly talking to its developers.
The cloud computing it is still in it's infacy, and this approach that approach is working for now, but it doesn't leave much room for the inevitable differences that will arise between cloud computing platforms.
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