Cloud Computing

Editor's Notes

1. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2008/tc2008082_445669.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_18/b4082059989191.htm http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071116_379585.htm
2. A host of providers including Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce.com (CRM), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft are helping corporate clients use the Internet to tap into everything from extra server space to software that helps manage customer relationships. Assigning these computing tasks to some remote location—rather than, say, a desktop computer, handheld machine, or a company's own servers—is referred to collectively as cloud computing Events like the six-hour outage on July 20 of Amazon's S3 service, designed for developers who want easy access to storage over the Internet A private cloud using IBM's Blue Cloud software and services, which turns a corporate data center into its own cloud. Since a private corporate cloud is blocked off from the Internet with firewalls, it provides a level of security
3. Cloud computing is similar to what the tech industry has been calling "on-demand" or "utility" computing, terms used to describe the ability to tap into computing power on the Web with the same ease as plugging into an electric outlet in your home This makes sense for people who don't want to invest in building their own data centers or don't want to buy all the hardware required to handle "peaks" in demand. You can rely on outside provider to give you servers, storage, and bandwidth as you need it. Cloud computing's appeal is that it can eliminate a company's need for its own data center. It also lets businesses pay for bandwidth on an on-demand basis
4. Starbucks (SBUX), for instance, used the Salesforce.com platform to create its new My Starbucks Idea Web site as an online community for employees and customers to share ideas about coffee, food, and the Starbucks experience. On the other hand, Ning, a company co-founded by Andreessen that makes it possible for individuals to operate their own social networks, runs all of the applications on its cloud. One notable Ning customer, rapper 50 Cent, has set up a custom-designed site there, and doesn't have to worry about a sudden rush on the site by the 200,000 people who are members of his Ning fan club. One of AT&T's first customers is the U.S. Olympic Committee. The organization, which runs teamusa.org and other Olympics Web sites, knows traffic will leap this month as fans watch videos and look up event results and then drop sharply as soon as the games are over. It plans to use the AT&T service to increase its network bandwidth temporarily Large numbers of Internet users are contributing data, pictures, and blogs to the Web sites. We need to be able to mine information out of those huge amounts of data
5. Supercomputers today are used mainly by the military, government intelligence agencies, universities and research labs, and large companies to tackle enormously complex calculations for such tasks as simulating nuclear explosions, predicting climate change, designing airplanes, and analyzing which proteins in the body are likely to bind with potential new drugs. Cloud computing aims to apply that kind of power—measured in the tens of trillions of computations per second—to problems like analyzing risk in financial portfolios, delivering personalized medical information, even powering immersive computer games, in a way that users can tap through the Web This makes sense for people who don't want to invest in building their own data centers or don't want to buy all the hardware required to handle "peaks" in demand. You can rely on outside provider to give you servers, storage, and bandwidth as you need it. One is scale. Google, Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon.com (AMZN) have vast data centers full of tens of thousands of server computers, offering computing power of a magnitude never before available. Cloud computing is also more flexible. Clouds can be used not only to perform specific computing tasks, but also to handle wide swaths of the technologies companies need to run their operations. Then there's efficiency: The servers are hooked to each other so they operate like a single large machine, so computing tasks large and small can be performed more quickly and cheaply than ever before.
6. Dell is also targeting this market. The computer marker supplies products to some of the largest cloud computing providers and Web 2.0 companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo (YHOO). "We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers," Dell CEO Michael Dell says. Microsoft has released online software called Windows Live for photo-sharing, file storage, and other applications served from new data centers. The software giant runs its consumer search and communications services on large cloud computing data centers. Just now, it's launching new cloud services for businesses, including e-mail and collaboration, under the Microsoft Online brand. AT&T Inc. is unveiling a service that provides computer networking and storage services for business customers, making the telecommunications giant the latest company to invest in what is known as "cloud computing." Right now, Google's strategy is to get as many people and companies as possible comfortable using Google Apps. To that end, the company is doing things like providing Google Apps for free to universities. "We're generating millions of users for life," he says. And on Apr. 7, Google (GOOG) took the first step toward opening its infrastructure to others. The company's App­Engine will let software developers create new programs and run them on Google's computers. The price will be tough for any rival to match: free.