Technology: Computing Clouds are Gathering

Since late 2007 Cloud Computing has taken off as technology and a new category buzzword. Wikipedia added a definition for Cloud Computing in September 2007. The wikipedia definition is:

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual server to a “cloud” of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, as the underlying details of how it’s achieved are hidden.

Cloud computing is being driven by SOA, Web 2.0 technologies, mashups, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce. It allows develoeprs to build applications using small amounts of computing power and to then be able to scale up phenomenally quickly to match the demand their software or service can generate. These technologies typically feature a metered billing where you pay only for what you use.

At once level, anything SaaS could be declared Cloud Computing. But the term has been used more frequently when applied to very flexible tools that are being created for companies to build out and host new applications very quickly and on shoe-string budgets.

Amazon started pushing the envelope with their uniquely metered S3 and EC2 storage and hosting services. EC2 was totally unique in concept when it started. You can create an image of a server and start, stop and scale up as you need. Unlike standard hosting where you pay for your hosted server for every minute and day you have a contract, with EC2 you can shut down your server and not be billed, or you can clone your server and scale up to a federation of servers that can attack a difficult problem or a spike of activity like the crush of incoming clicks prompted by an ad on the superbowl.
In November, IBM created a service similar to EC2 called Blue Cloud. In December, Amazon added a service called SimpleDB that allows queries to be made against structured data stored on Amazon’s servers. And, also in December, BusinessWeek crowned Google a Cloud Computing leader.
Google’s Eric Schmidt said of Cloud Computing: “…small and midsize companies, as well as universities and individuals — in other words, a majority of computer users — could shift toward Web-based cloud computing fairly quickly.. Small businesses could greatly reduce their costs and technology headaches by adopting the Web offerings” now available from Google and others.

As steam picks up for Cloud Computing, 2008 could well shape up as a banner year.