Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.
There are several ways to classify different cloud architectures, but the three most prevalent are:
- Infrastructure as service [example: Amazon EC2]
- Platform as service [example: Google API's]
- Software as service [examples: Salesforce, Google Apps]
The issues surrounding the cloud (besides the obvious one of vendors rapidly pushing incomplete software to market) are:
- Reliability
- Redundancy
- Latency
- Performance
- Security
I’ll talk about each of these in turn in the next few posts. BTW… This website is hosted in the cloud – Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – to be more precise.
