Cloud Computing... The future Haze.

Cloud computing has been in the news, a lot actually..

Understanding the cloud:

Cloud computing refers to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT paradigm, where the end-user does not know (or have to know) where the IT enabled service is hosted, maintained or stored.

The end-user is simply assuming that the service is somewhere there in the “Cloud”.

Here is a typical Cloud architecture : There can be many background services making up the cloud, DataStorage, Applications, Infrastructure etc, with virtualization adding another dimension to the whole 'Cloud' scenario. The 'Cloud Clients' can be anything right from Mobile Clients to desktops to laptops on Wi-Fi, and as the concept goes, the Client is totally oblivious to the technology in the background, accessing software as a service just as we use electricity on use per unit basis. In the future of things to come, we might be using Visual Studio "Online Edition" and compile our programs on a transparent third-party server and simply save the code on our disk. Pay for as many hours you use the service!!

This is the excerpt from my presentation at the MicrosoftMindstorm - a student DevCon at Ahemdabad on 30th August.