If you’ve not already heard the term (gasp!) or don’t have an idea about cloud computing you can look no further than the excellent, short presentation titled “Cloud Computing – Why IT matters” by Simon Wardley. Also, read a great paper about the subject “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” [PDF].
Usually in technically adept circles you can hear virtualization being used more often than the term cloud computing, the technology that enable computers to evaporate into small H2O particles and form clouds. Virtualization tools have been there for a while. It was, IMHO, got popular after Amazon slapped a Web services interface in front of Xen and said, try using this interface to start/stop and manage virtual machines. Having a separate service for persistent storage, again, is a brilliant marketing move. With big investments (such as Intel investing in Joyent) one can guarantee that the cloud space will get cloudier as time progress. This might make projects such as Simple Cloud more attractive.
Adoption rates for cloud computing is going to increase among the big guys. As a survey done by Forrester tells “one out of four large companies plan to use an external provider soon, or have already employed one”. When people are seriously considering moving to cloud platforms, you have to make sure that all the application programs are ready to be run on a virtualized environment. Specially SOA middleware products that the company is using should be compatible and must be able to take advantage of the services provided.
One advantage of moving to cloud computing is the ability to add/remove resources as and when it’s required. If your applications, or middleware products that you’re using is incapable of getting advantage of this elasticity (autoscaling to the inner techie in you) there’s no point, or no value gained by putting your stuff in the cloud. It’s one reason why WSO2 has “cloud enabled” all of the products line. Not only you can host all your services in the cloud using WSO2 middleware products, you can download pre-built images for VMware and KVM to run inside your private virtualized infrastructure. Give it a whirl and see!
