Cloud Computing

Technology is starting to focus its innovation into cloud computing, although shrink-wrap software still dominates the market. The change to cloud computing will affect every level of the computing ecosystem. This is only the second coming of cloud computing, the first being 50 years ago with the creation of service bureaus and time-sharing systems that provided access to computing machinery for uses who lacked a mainframe. Computation is shifting again, with functions migrating outward to distant data centers reached through the internet. End users and IT managers once argued over possession of computing resources, and now they are willing to surrender control to a third party service provider. Outsourcing computation to an internet service eliminated many concerns such as new released updates cascading off of subsequent revisions to other programs. The aim of cloud computing is to concentrate computation and storage in the core, where high-performance machines are linked by high-bandwidth connections, with all of these resources being carefully managed. At the fringe are end users making requests that initiate computations and who receive the results. The future of cloud computing is far less than clear, but a few present practices suggest some likely directions. Such as Google Docs programs which offer word processing, spreadsheets, and tools for creating powerpoint presentations. There are companies out there who build and maintain data centers, like amazon who offers data storage priced by the gigabyte-month and computing capacity by the CPU-hour. IBM has announced plans for the “BlueCloud” infrastructure, and Google is testing the “App Engine” which provides hosting on Google server farms and a software environment centered on the Python programming language system and the Bigtable distributed storage system.

For most cloud-computing applications, the entire user interface resides inside a single window in a web-browser. Some initiatives aim to exploit the...