Mind Infinity

Cloud computing is in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. This network of servers and connections is collectively known as “the cloud.” Computing at the scale of the cloud allows users to access supercomputer-level power in a distributed network. Users uses browsers, thin clients, mobiles to access the services. Processing power, bandwidth, memory are managed remotely. Cloud computing is used in the system with business model software as a service.

Many companies are embracing Cloud Computing which means they are changing their data centers with help of virtualization technology and reducing the complexity using systems such as Xen etc.

In virtualization, software deployment has become easier as hardware is reduced, (citrix is one of popular service to give applications for the users). As the hardware resources are less and shared by the users thus reducing the costs.

With use of cloud computing or grid computing, infrastructure maintenance and applications development is separated and also from physical resources.

• Users interact with the cloud using User Interface
• Services has list of services they can access
• Systems Managements manages the resources to be given to the user
• Provisioning tool provides the services to the users
• Monitoring tool monitors the resources required for the users and allocates them accordingly

Cloud computing use virtual storage can be either one physical storage or it can be on multiple networked servers.

IBM has released new servers to do the cloud computing, they have launched water cooled servers to make use of cloud computing. Developers can actually forget about the hardware resources and control their software. and IBM is very keen in developing their hardware in cloud computing which will be the future.

Many companies are providing the applications using web services which uses cloud computing.

• Amazon uses cloud computing to provide their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud called as EC2 which uses XEN Virtualization. It lets you use amazon computing resources with their cloud computing platform and create your own application environment (virtual machine) and use web services to use them, with security and permissions, and pay only for the services you use. This is an inexpensive solution to use amazon resources.
• Google has launched recently an app engine for developers which is under beta now. It lets you use their resources on the same platform which they use for their applications, such as gmail, docs etc. Developers can develop their application, initially they support python (it may extend with other languages in future), and publish an application and can also provide webservices to access the application. App engine also enables developers to create their own datastores (databases).
• Yahoo partnered with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to support research on cloud computer which is owned by Tata Sons Ltd., a Mumbai, India will lend their super computers.
• Microsoft has launced its Live Mesh , with its SDK developers can make applications in their platform and data can be shared across the users which is a mesh. Developers can be create web application or rich client application using the mesh and accessed anywhere and can use the underlying resources.
• SalesForce have released their cloud computing architecture on the name of Force.com which lets you create a business application and development process is rapidly fast.

Check out a video on cloud computing by Pinceston University research

Withe the popularity of Internet, everyone likes to use the services on the Go, and cloud computing is the way to go. Many companies like this are investing in cloud computing and keen to give the users their services to grab the market opportunity in the technology.