You've probably heard the buzz-word “Cloud Computing” tossed around recently. Cloud Computing is the next big thing in remote and distributed computing and is very much in fashion now for many industry bellwethers like IBM, Sun, Amazon, Google and storage giants like EMC. You don't have to have a degree in IT to see it coming together. If you've played around with Gmail or Google Docs, even as an end user, you've already seen the beginnings of something big, really big. As with any budding new market however, there are a lot more questions than answers these days, perhaps because the possibilities are seemingly infinite. Let's take a quick gander at a basic high level understanding of how the cloud works and what the building blocks are. Cloud Computing High-Level Diagram, Courtesy: Wikipedia The term “cloud” was originally coined by networking technologist to explain a group of resources connected together as one. These days, coupled with the word “computing”, the cloud takes on a whole new meaning. The concept is quite simple actually but it's the forces at play that leave us all speculating how the landscape will take shape. As the internet's capacity has scaled and enabled powerful new functionalities, real-time virtual resource access and billing/metering of those resources, the Cloud Computing model gained serious traction. The market has evolved from offering not only enterprise and educational institutions, services like Amazon's EC2 , but also services like Google Apps are being offered all the way down to the average end user
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Cloud Computing, The Future Takes Nebulous Shape
