Imagine being able to kick start your new business with a simple click of a mouse button; imagine having the ability to scale IT infrastructure up and down dynamically, all with a few clicks, while you only pay for what you use and not a penny more! This is just part of the essence and power that cloud computing can provide today.

Cloud computing has definitely evolved a lot over the years. It is not surprising that today, it has become almost a mainstream part of our lives; from storing personal data and accessing it from anywhere across the world, to having burst compute capacity and enterprise software applications available on demand, anytime and anywhere.

A lot of top-notch companies are already investing heavily in cloud computing for the future, building a variety of open source and propriety cloud tools, and platforms that we, as end users, can use and exploit to the fullest. One such company is VMware, which has been a leader in the virtualization industry for quite some time. VMware offers a huge suite of enterprise class products that can be leveraged to transform your IT datacenters into fully functional and automated cloud environments. In this book, we are going to explore the possibilities of cloud computing using VMware's latest service offering in the Public Cloud arena called VMware vCloud Air.

In this chapter, we are going to look at some of the features and benefits provided by Cloud Computing in general, along with a few interesting enterprise use cases for cloud computing. We will be covering this through the following topics:

Later on, we will look into some simple steps that will help you sign up and get started quickly with VMware vCloud Air.