Cloud Computing - Computing slowly moving to the "pay as you go" era.

Data centres in its current form may not exist for much longer into the future. Data is moving to the cloud. The kind of computing that the Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others have become synonymous with will come to common data centre realm soon.

Today, IT managers add capacity, fault tolerance, fail over, load balancing, and other data centre features much painstakingly for storage scalability and performance in an incessant manner. Just when they begin to feel that they have enough capacity and performance built in to their systems, that they have made their data centre future proof, there is a new need on the performance or expandability front.

Cloud computing will make it much less painful to manage, scale and develop a reliable, high performance platform without running a single data centre. Cloud computing is often compared to electrical utility where one pays for what he uses and when he uses. Gartner predicts that by "2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing services, and 30 percent will be paying for cloud computing infrastructure services."

Amazon.com is a perfect example for the future of cloud computing. They have now come to offer computing power over the web to would be customers. "Since early 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has provided companies of all sizes with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. With AWS you can requisition computing power, storage, and other services–gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as your business demands them."

Cloud computing offers significant cost savings for IT functions that are large-scale as well as small scale. Other advantages include management and scalability.

Six layers within the cloud computing are cloud clients, services, application, platform, storage, and infrastructure. Example of cloud computing that’s already out there include Google Docs, the MS Office competitor and Slide Rocket (for great online presentations). Cloud computing relates to Web 2.0 and which is utilised by sites such as Salesforce.com (the famed CRM on the web).

While we have examples of Google Docs for SaaS (Software as a service) model, we have Amazon.com web services in HaaS (Hardware as a service) as example where we can actually purchase computing power already.

"Gartner’s named Amazon, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft, and IBM as vendors that are leading the charge towards computing in the cloud."

Whatever said and done, at the moment Cloud Computing is hardly more than a buzz word and much more has to happen for it to get into the serious main stream business. It can be expected that in the next five years or so, we will get into more serious use of cloud computing. Those who adopt this technology now can be termed as visionary though we can expect a lot of opposition from traditional data centre managers who might be fearful for their career as cloud gathers to take it away.

So, the future where we stop worrying about our server being up, may not be far away. It is already here, we just have to figure out what we are going to do with it.

External References for you.

Gartner, Google discuss future of cloud computing
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/112339,gartner-google-discuss-future-of-cloud-computing.aspx

Amazon Web Services.
http://aws.amazon.com/

What is Cloud Computing? - Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q

Explaining Cloud Computing - Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplXnFUlPmg

By T. P. Gopinath, Director - e-Business