Cloud Computing (Part 2)

At the fringe are the end users making the requests that initiate computations and who receive the results. Although the future of cloud computing is less than clear, a few examples of present practice suggest likely directions:

Wordstar for the Web. The kinds of productivity applications that first attracted people to personal computers 30 years ago are now appearing as software services. The Google Docs programs are an example, including a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a tool for creating PowerPoint-like presentations. Another undertaking of this kind is Buzzword, a Web-based word processor acquired by Adobe Systems in 2007. Another recent Adobe product is Photoshop Express, which has turned the well-known image-manipulation program into an online service.

Enterprise computing in the cloud.

Software for major business applications (such as customer support, sales, and marketing) has generally been run on corporate servers, but several companies now provide it as an on-demand service. The first was Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, offering a suite of online programs for customer relationship management and other business oriented tasks; the company’s slogan is “No software!”

Cloudy infrastructure. It’s all very well to outsource the chore of building and maintaining a data center, but someone must still supply that infrastructure. Amazon.com has moved into this niche of the Internet ecosystem. Amazon Web Services offers data storage priced by the gigabyte-month and computing capacity by the CPUhour. Both kinds of resources expand and contract according to need. IBM has announced plans for the “Blue Cloud” infrastructure. And Google is testing the App Engine, which provides hosting on Google server farms and a software environment centered on the Python programming language and the Bigtable distributed storage system.

The cloud OS. For most cloud-computing applications, the entire user interface resides inside a single window in a Web browser. Several initiatives aim to provide a richer user experience for Internet applications. One approach is to exploit the cloud-computing paradigm to provide all the facilities of an operating system inside a browser. The eyeOS system, for example, reproduces the familiar desktop metaphor—with icons for files, folders, and applications—all living in a browser window.

YOUTUBE VIDEO LECTURES:

1. Amazon’s Cloud Computing

2. Computing in the Cloud – What Next?

3. Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0

4. Cloud Computing