Anish Shrestha

Application Service Provider (ASP), Grid computing, utility Computing, Software as A Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service. All these words or more has been one time or another has been referred to Cloud Computing. What is Cloud Computing??? I’ve been spending a little of time in researching it as I thought it e being a little more buzzword in the market. Now I feel what not Cloud Computing is!!!

I’ll try to explain the Cloud Computing in the plain English. What is Cloud Computing and what can it do for you?? Cloud Computing is basically a convergence of three major trends: Virtualization (where application are separated from the infrastructures), Utility Computing (where the server capacity is accessed across the grid as a variably price share d service) and Software as Service (where the application are available on demand on a subscription basis). To understand Cloud Computing let’s see how it started. At the beginning, Algore gave us the internet and Broadband got very cheap and some smart fox realized that not everyone have the in-house datacenters infact they realized that the computers running the application could be pretty far from the person using it. And only the fast connection was needed between them. This led to the SaaS. Essentially the big, fast machines at someone else’s datacenter running an application we use access running our familiar web browser. Someone else owns the application and we pay a fixed subscription fee. Sounds Kool, huh??? Yes and No. But for the large enterprises with the complex requirement it didn’t fit. Some company didn’t like the data outside their firewall and they had to pay the subscription fee even when they are not using it. But what enterprises wanted was the convenience and simplicity of SaaS with the flexibility of the traditional computing. But the application was so hard to be deployed in the new environment. Then came Virtualization.

With Virtualization, application and infrastructures were independent, allowing servers to be easily shared by many applications and application to be run virtually anywhere. i.e. as long as the applications virtualized. Virtualization an application involves packaging including the database, middle ware and an operating system. This self-contained unit of Virtualized application can run pretty much anywhere. If they can run anywhere they don’t have to run in your datacenter or in application provider’s datacenter. It can run in the CLOUD!!! Cloud is the computing service that charges you only on the basis of the computing resources you use. This “Pay As you Go” feature is the hallmark of the today’s Cloud Computing. And one of the things that set it apart from the software is the Service.

So, why adopt Cloud Computing??? Basically, you can’t afford not to. The engine that powers Cloud Computing is the Virtualization. You can’t deploy apps to the Cloud without the virtualization. So, the first stop in initiating the cloud computing is to adapt the application to run as virtualized images. In turbulent economy, Cloud computing is even more attractive. Why pay for more computing capacity than you need, when you can pay only for what you use!!! I hope it helped you understand what Cloud hype is all about in plain English!!!