hi
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Cloud Computing is an architectural concept that will drive us into 70's VT-100 terminals but with an HTTP client built-in ;P It's the concept of software exposed as service over the internet, only that.
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Cloud Computing is an architectural concept that will drive us into 70's VT-100 terminals but with an HTTP client built-in ;P It's the concept of software exposed as service over the internet, only that.
It's amazing that with new technology, the theme is always the same (dumb terminals vs. web browsers, client server vs web services, etc). I wonder what new technology will be for the punch card.
One hand clapping
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OK, this is by no ways a very informed answer and it's not particularly my field... but during the Customer Test Program phase of Microsoft Azure coming into being I created an account and had a play. During that time I could immediately see some obvious applications, and recently when I was looking at actual enterprises that have gone with Azure some were very much along the lines of what had gone through my mind. By the way, why Azure and not some other solution would almost certainly have to do with whether ones's business was already aligned to MS technologies, such as .NET development. Writing apps for Azure is not significantly different to writing any other .NET applications. One application for example was an event ticketing site (if that is the right term.. ticketing of sports events, concerts etc). That specific application has certain aspects that might suggest the cloud as a very cost-effective solution. It is likely idle for much of the time, but could have extreme demands at others... thousands of people trying to snap up concert tickets in a few minutes. To maintain one's own infrastructure to support this application would not be trivial! And it's definitely not something that you plop onto a typical web-hosting site, it would break in a minute flat. But the underlying Azure platform takes care of the scaling of that workload (e.g. creating new VM instances for large volumes of workflows), and the cost is basically "pay for what you use". Your infrastructure cost is, crudely speaking, proportionate to use (and we presume that during that use you are making money). Without getting into it, I was also intrigued by the service bus component of Azure. Again, pretty crude playing, but it seemed relatively easy to host aplications on my machine that were exposing WCF service endpoints on the worldwide web (Azure) to other networks. I could immediately think of some possibilities for "out of the box" apps communicating with other business entities.. perhaps exchanging EDI documents as an example. Of course there would be other ways of doing that, but I could see some definite uses for Azure to (I think) greatly simplify some things. Remember, I am a .NET developer so Azure made sense to me. I doubt that what they offer is really unique, it is MS particular cloud solution. This is just one example, and I have not really defined "what is the cloud?" to which you will get a million different answers. Whether an application is suited to cloud hosting gets down to a lot of factors and