Cloud Computing

Visited Cloudcamp today at IIT Delhi, it was a nice experience, came to know about few new terms and business models. Here I try to share some of it.

You can find Definition of cloud computing at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing, at broad level, there are three type of cloud computing

Software as a service : SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or upload the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms. In Indian context Airtel has stack of such products. There was presentation from salesforce.com on their offering. I use to know salesforce as CRM application provider only, but today I came know that they have development platform (onforce.com) to offer too.

Platform as a service' (PaaS) the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It often goes further with the provision of a software development platform, that is designed for Cloud Computing at the top of the cloud stack. There was presentation from Microsoft on this, Microsoft presentation was around their product Azure. The product looks promising.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the delivery of computer infrastructure (typically a platform virtualization environment) as a service. There was presentation by amazon on their products, the presenter spoke about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in detail.

If this interests you, google it… you will find tons of information and business ideas around this.