Cloud Computing: An Overview and the Future Direction

 Overview:

Cloud computing is about moving services, computation and/or data to an off-site to an internal or external, location-independent, centralized facility for the purpose of business and cost advantage. Cloud computing can be classified into three sections.

•  Saas: Companies like  Google Apps, Salesforce.com provide WAN enabled application service.
• Paas: Companies like Coghead, Google Application Engine provide Platform-as-a-service to develop applications.
• Iaas: Company like  Amazon provides Infrastructure as a service for computation and storage purpose.

The underneath technologies that enables cloud computing are SOA, SaaS, Client Protocols like HTML, CSS, AJAX, REST, Inexpensive and huge CPU  bandwidth to support client infrastructure, large infrastructure service from Google, Yahoo, AmazonGoogle etc and virtualization.

The crucial benefit of cloud computing is that it lowers the capital expense for an organization. Developing an infrastructure for application services requires huge amount of capital expenses till deployment. Cloud computing addresses those problems  by allowing expenses to monitor closely with resource use. A cloud vendor provides the resources as the demand from client side increases. With the added hardware and infrastructure resources, cloud service provides scalability with various demand range.

Future of Cloud Computing:

• In the future, more cloud will come into picture, this year alone many big organizations moved into cloud service.  Already the cloud business have grown by over 200%. Large vendors see this as the growing model for software and services in the future so vendors are putting more pressure on it.
• “Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors’ visions of the data center of the future; it’s an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. It also has all the earmarks of a disruptive innovation: It is enterprise technology packaged to best fit the needs of small businesses and start-ups–not the enterprise,” Forrester Research said.
• The number of mobile applications is growing sharply. However, limited processing power, battery life and data storage  of mobile phone limit the growth of application software for mobile industry. The adoption of cloud computing is going to make mobile apps more sophisticated and they are going to be available for broader audience of subscribers.
• Startups and enterprise will realise that the physical layer of the platform they are using for application middleware is not a part of the cloud as of yet. The usability of the cloud’s utility model (pay-per-use) cannot be taken advantage of without application platform. That’s why a new generation of application servers, such as GigaSpaces XAP and Appistry will grow for the cloud users.
• Lower costs of application deployment, attractive return of investment and quick payback of development cost is going to make the choice of cloud computing very lucrative down the road for both entrepreneurs as well as developers.
• Due the the economic downturn, many organization will try to reduce the operating cost. They will move towards lightweight client machines running free and open-source operating systems and applications. Simultaneously, the major chunk of the computing process will run on cloud.
• Major vendors like Amazon, Google, CA, Microsoft and IBM  already provide cloud services. In future, other big enterprise like Citrix, Sun, HP, Cisco, Intuit, Symantec, Yahoo  will also expand the cloud services.
• Developers from India, china or Brazil will see growing business in their home market and focus on high value application for overseas market rather than offering low-cost intensive labor.