Cloud computing

If you are new to cloud computing, you might be wondering why we are discussing cloud computing as our next hop right after virtualization. The answer to your question is that cloud computing is a guy in the market, which boomed virtualization with one step ahead, as it introduced virtualization as a base infrastructure component of cloud computing. Cloud computing is more about combining people, processes, and technologies towards providing IT as a service; and in this journey of cloud computing, virtualization provides a platform on which cloud computing builds its architecture to use pools of hardware resources and share them, whenever it is required with orchestration and provide self service to its customers.

If you have been around the IT field for some time now, you must have heard about this term. Cloud computing is a way to deliver IT services in a more dynamic and self-service way, where someone can request for a virtual machine or a software environment to set up or build their own application, or use a publically hosted service. The cloud service provider and its customer relationship are tightly synchronized with each other, where on one side the party hosting the service needs to provide all these types of computing services to its end users with some sort of self-service style. And on the other side, depending on the user's needs, he/she can request a service and the service gets provisioned without any intervention. Another important aspect of this service is that it should be flexible enough so that if the service needs to be scaled out, it has enough scalability to cater for the request load.

Because cloud computing is an extremely diversified field of technology, all vendors, suppliers, and technology providers phrase their definition in their own way to explain their cloud offerings.

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) provided its standard definition as a common understanding for everyone. So instead of understanding and creating our own cloud computing definition let's take a look at the definition of cloud computing provided by NIST. Visit the following URL for the definition:

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf