Cloud computing is todays emerging trend. It is also called as Saas (Software as a Service). Everybody in IT today is getting ready to face the next era which is going to be fully loaded with the tasty SaaS. Most of the industry giants  like Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Google are investing millions of dollars into research on cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a collection of dynamically scalable resources distributed as services over the Internet on a utility basis. It differs from Grid computing where grid computing is a cluster of computing resources loosely coupled and performing very large tasks and Cloud computing is collection of reliable services delivered through large data centers (more often, on-demand) and built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies.

The services in cloud computing are accessible anywhere in the internet. Often the clouds appear as single point of access for all of its consumers for their computing needs. Commercially available services are ofcourse required to meet QoS (Quality of Services) requirements of their customers. Let me give an example of such a service, which is already provided by the mobile phone operators over the past decade, named SMS gateway.

Cloud computing (Image courtesy: Wikimedia)

Unlike the EMail, sending SMS to a mobile phone needs either another mobile connection or a subscription to a SMS gateway service provided by a mobile service provider. Sending SMS though Mobile phone/MODEM is not an reliable and ideal solution for commercial application needs. When the consumer subscribes to the SMS gateway he/she will be provided with an interface API which is connected to the central server where the SMS messages are being routed thru. The SMS gateway provides give API libraries for wide variety of application development platforms including .Net, Java, php. Since, not everybody can establish their own gateway, just for their minimum needs, people have just started using these thirdparty services.

Cloud computing is also consisting of the same kind of services which shares resources like, storage, running applications like wordprocessors data analysis tools, etc., Yahoo, Rediffmail are already providing small business EMail services. Smaller companies need not establish their own email servers for their employees, they can just start using these small business email solutions which are cost effective and maintenance free.

The advantages of Cloud computing include,

1. Rapid and inexpensive establishment of resources for the projects which are required to be kick-started immediately from the thirdparty insfrastructural resources already available in over the web.
2. Greater reduction in cost of infrastructure (including capital expenditure and real-estate) required for the projects, where software licences and hardware resources are being shared between multiple projects as well as companies. Particularly the pricing on a utility computing basis in fine-grained with usage based payment options.
3. Users can access the shared resources from anywhere over the web.
4. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the Cloud that supports them.
5. Improved utilization and efficiency for systems that are often underutilized.
6. Improved reliability through the availability of resources over multiple sites, which really guaranties the coud computing to be well-suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.
7. Since provisioning the resources on a real-time and self-service basis, the scalability is ensured.
8. Due to the centralization of hardware, software resources, the security is far more better than the traditional computing systems.
9. Through improved resource utilization and efficiency, the cloud computing supports green and carbon-free environment.

For more reading on Cloud computing, kindly follow the links below:

Cloud computing book – 4 chapters

How Stuff Works article on Cloud computing

Online applications provided to everyone in the world by Google

Google Business Solutions