Cloud Computing to be hot topic in 2009!
By Tarry Singh at 6 January, 2009, 12:13 am
The pitch is that customers can take advantage of Amazon’s expertise in running large data centers, that customers pay only for the compute and storage resources they use, and that Amazon can scale up or down easily, depending on the demand.
That’s the most basic level of cloud computing – infrastructure in the cloud. In this scenario, the customer is aware of and makes choices concerning the infrastructure itself.
The next level is cloud computing as a Web development platform. The best example is Google’s App Engine, a place where Web application developers can upload code (as long as it’s written in Python) and let Google’s infrastructure take care of deploying the application and allocating compute resources.
The third level is running enterprise applications in the cloud. A cloud vendor could host an enterprise application and take responsibility for that application’s availability and performance. Gartner predicts e-mail will become one of the first enterprise applications that move to the cloud.
How is that different from software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Without getting too tangled up in semantics, SaaS typically refers to a specific vendor – Salesforce.com, for example – offering its application to multiple customers in a hosted model. Theoretically, a SaaS vendor could use the cloud infrastructure to host its applications. Also theoretically, a cloud provider could host anybody’s application.
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