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Cloud has been making a lot of noise and almost every tech (or tech related) person knows about it or at least heard of it. Now for those who have just heard about it but do not know what it means here is a quick definition from Dave Neilsen, the founder of Cloud-Camp. He says, “For something to be called cloud, it should have these properties :

• Hosted by someone else

• On-demand. Do not have to wait or call somebody to get it.

• Metered somehow. So you know exactly how much you are using and how much you are paying.

• Scalable, both ways - up and down as and when you require.”

He goes on to say that Cloud could mean different things for different people. Here area few examples stating what cloud is for a particular person :

For an IT guy – Infrastructure as Service For a Web Developer – Platform. Just dump your code and don’t worry what runs it. For a Business guy – SaaS (Software as a Service)

That was pretty neat. Helps me answer the standard question “What the hell is this cloud thing?” in a sane manner. Earlier I could never figure out what a proper answer should be for this question, because there was so much to tell.

Here is my attempt to elaborate on above mentioned examples.

So cloud is basically having the infrastructure to do what you do hosted by someone else and having it totally scalable. For example, in the above list, for a web developer cloud is a platform where he can dump his code and expect it to run as he has designed it. He does not worry about the machines, the network connectivity, the bandwidth. He just pays for those in a metered manner. He scales his platform whenever he wants. He can increase his bandwidth quota, move to a better machine, increase the number of machines and all of this without calling the customer care or the sales guy. He will do it by logging into the cloud services website or he would have a script do this for him automatically, i.e if he is geek enough.

Similarly for a business man, it is software as a service. E-mail service would probably be a good example. The business man does not know what software runs the email system, he does not worry about what version of email server is running, what os it is running on, what DB it is using to store the emails, what protocols it is making use of. If the email contents are not that sensitive he would not even worry about the physical location of the servers storing these emails. He just buys the email software as a service and uses it. All that he probably worries about is how many email accounts are available to him/his company and how reliable/usable they are. At any point he can increase or decrease the number of accounts, once again without making a call.

That’s cloud computing.