Note : Soon, I'll rename & reform this 'linux tidbits' to include some other tech stuff as well. Till then I have to stuff things in even though they really have nothing to do with linux.

Cloud computing... quite a buzz word huh? The first time I heard the term, I couldn’t quite relate it to my life. But today, Hysea’s initiation on this front, first ever of its kind in India, as a workshop held at Google, Hyderabad, helped me gain some insights into the term. I’ll try putting it in ‘technical layman’s terms, to help out guys who are in a state where I was earlier.

Think of a situation, for example, where you want to develop a web application but have no idea of how to scale well to a la…arge number of users, how to set things like.. servers up, their configurations right, just for developing and running the product. Now say, there’s some guy out there who is willing to provide this platform required for product development & deployment… for some pay, of course! Say he provides these things : database storage application, some kind of cgi like interface for dynamic content and a web server. What do we call these? Softwares! But now, that guy is offering these things through web. That’s the key in this example!

Doing things through Web, the Internet, the ….. cloud!! This is what we call cloud computing. Btw, the above example falls under a category called SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service. Still wonder w(hy)tf it is called Cloud? It’s just because in network literature there are lots of cloud pictures which represent Internet, we might have seen them too :) . So it all boils down to ‘Using Internet to do the things’. Now, what are those things? Ahh.. it could be anything, absolutely.. any... thing!

Few examples will give you a kick start,

1. Google app engine, which is a web application development platform, and even, Google docs.
2. Microsoft live mesh
3. Adobe AIR
4. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Actually there are many, many more! I have listed just these, only because they might sound familiar to you. All those examples show you different ways to use the ‘Cloud’.

I don’t like to go beyond this basic notion, as it may hamper your innovation to think in a different way to use ‘Cloud’. Interested guys can dig deep and get thrilled! So, all the best with Cloud Applications!

Thanks to Dr. Ramesh Loganathan, M.D of Progess Software, Hysea and Google Hyderabad for giving us a good learning experience.