Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the hottest and talk of the IT industry today! It gives the flexi and easy to manage way to utilize resources thru Internet.
Basically it involves both suppliers and users(or receivers). Amazon is the best example of this Cloud computing and it is one of the major vendor that providesmany services using this Cloud computing concepts.
Cloud computing is generally defined as delivering hosted services thru Internet.
You can consider Google's upcoming OS Chrome which is going to be a Cloud computing based service.
Simply explain this concept, consider you need to work with MS-Word and you dont have that software in your system. What you need to do is to go and buy a license and a software CD for MS-Office and then to install in your system. This involves money and time.But when you use Cloud computing no matter at which corner of the world you are, you can just browse the internet and look for the service provider orvendor who supplies MS-Word for you and you pay for the particular moment that you need to work and use it and go away. No need to waste much money andtime for this. This is the biggest advantage of Cloud computing. This is the way Google's new OS is going to work and that challenges Microsoft very badly.

Cloud computing services are broadly categorised into 3 services.
1) IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
This is to provide infrastructures such as Server(virutal server), memory etc.. E.g Amazon. Users can use their APIs to utilize this service on demand.
2) PaaS (Platform as a Service)
This is to provide software tool or product wherein user can create their application on it. E.g.GoogleApps
3) SaaS (Software as a Service)
This is the very broad category in Cloud computing. This varies from any simple software support to even a hardware supports.

Cloud computing can Public or Private
Public - means it opens to anybody over the Internet
Private - opens to only within their organization or group