In and out of the Clouds

Cloud computing is certainly emerging as a new paradigm for supporting aggregation of data and computational resources. With the emergence of data centres, it is very likely that such capability will be the basis for future resource provisioning in distributed systems -- especially with the capability to undertake service aggregation (mashups) across multiple providers. A key concept in Cloud computing seems to be the idea of virtualization. Two contrasting stories indicate how Cloud computing is being viewed today -- whereas the New York Times thinks this is an important emerging trend (mentioning a few companies already utilizing this technology), the BBC thinks that fault tolerance, reliability and privacy are likely to be limitations for actual take up of Cloud computing ideas. The Economist has also published recently about Cloud Computing -- primarily treating this as a means to support services on large scale data centres. Will be interesting to see how this field matures.