A lot is being said and done about cloud computing which is something like a newer version of what we call utility computing. Information technology is always changing and reforming and the new terms are indicators of this revolution. Cloud computing is trying to address the issue of the brittleness and rigidity that we face every time while handling a PC or a laptop. It starts with admitting the fact that there IS the problem, and then moves on to answer the problem as Timothy Prickett Morgan puts it by” building redundancies of all kinds into virtual, rather than physical, server infrastructure. And if we are lucky, all of this gets done in such a way that we don’t realize that our machines are not physical, or better still, the level of abstraction is so good we don’t know where the applications run–and on how many servers–so long as the response time is good and we can afford to pay for it”
Microsoft made it known in a recent announcement that it would be introducing its Azure public cloud computing platform as private, a step IT Jungle reports will attract a throng of masses, much bigger than the one it would have attracted had it been being a public-only cloud.
The article elaborates on what cloud computing is, its demand and relevance in modern times and off course the stand of Microsoft’s Azure in all this. The latest craze in the software world as of now is Virtualization and herein lies the relevance of cloud computing. It is something by which we refer to virtualized storage, server and a super speedy networking that can be swapped around a single data center or between more than one data centers as conditions as per the situation demands. The manufacturers need to keep in mind the end customer an s well as the requirement of the application and system software manufacturers and at the same time provide a nice level of security which is intrinsic in this type of set ups.
According to the Timothy, the author of the article in IT Jungle, there are less than 100 real public clouds which are out in the race. Some of them use raw server infrastructure—which is a hyper visor, seeming to be in need of an operating system and applications, like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and there are the more developed ones that enhance the level of abstraction and virtualization further up by a layer and allows the users with many services, successfully disguising the infrastructure lying underneath. Google’s Python-based App Engine as well as Microsoft’s Azure clouds fall in this category.
The only problem that seems to come along the Azure cloud is that one has to run code outside his firewall and on the infrastructure owned by Microsoft. It’s highly likely that the midrange and enterprise sized customers are not likely to lap up this concept easily. The reason behind their turning it down is as basic as concern for Security, Sanity and employment reasons.
