How many times have you been told this: Is your head in the clouds?!? Usually, it’s not a compliment, but these days that might just change. Of course, it’s about a different Cloud and it would be nice to have your IT services there, not your head. 🙂

I see at least a dozen of articles every day on cloud computing, written by people from various areas of business: IT, marketing, sales, even HR. They debate on cloud definition, advantages and disadvantages, on myths, data security, lock-in degree, and ultimately whether cloud computing really is a new concept or just an over-hyped renaming of the old IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models or even a clever marketing-invented new name for virtualized environments.

Actually, Cloud Computing is not a fancy name of virtualization that a marketing guru dreamed one night and spread it out in the morning! What is Cloud Computing?

Someone compared it with electricity. Once you are connected to the network, you have it; usage is scaled based on your needs at a certain moment in time, and you only pay for what you use. Hopefully 😉 Average users aren’t probably very interested in how it”™s created or how it gets to them. It usually is pretty reliable. You won’t have to put any effort into managing it, as you would have to do if you owned a generator for example, and it will work close to 99.99 percent of the time. Of course, in that 0.01% you will be very unhappy if you didn’t back yourself up with a generator.

Basically, you can define Cloud Computing in the same way, based on its 3 main features:

• Elasticity: scale up and down programmatically and seamlessly, based on your needs at a given time
• Self-service: service provisioning and access to resources is automated. You don’t need the IT guy from the cloud company to log in and add more memory to your cloud instance.
• Pay-as-you-go: your service cost is given by resource consumption.

I have just described the IaaS cloud, but actually PaaS shares the same characteristics for services like database access, storage, messaging etc. SaaS is even closer to the user as it gives him direct access to the useful stuff: applications.

As you can see, cloud is much more than simple virtualization. In fact, although difficult from the management perspective, it is possible to build cloud services without virtualization! For example, for PaaS/SaaS it really doesn’t matter how the infrastructure is built. IaaS requires a high degree of virtualization, but that’s it.

When you say Cloud computing, everybody’s thinking lower cost. In my opinion, agility, scalability and fast access to resources are advantages far more important.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TL0XuG-snM[/youtube]

Cloud really works. Not only that we develop solutions for cloud heavily demanded by companies that see all advantages, BUT we also use cloud in our company in all areas we can. And we are extremely happy about it. How about you?