In the near future, our data and programs will be floating somewhere in the connected servers known as the Cloud. All of the computation will be done within there, and the processed results will be stored in there as well. The main idea is to incorporate software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is the big promise of the so-called "Cloud Computing". As a matter of fact the concept is a reality today in the form of proprietary implementations, thanks to the pioneers in this field. The concept has been considered as the first major IT market disruption that has taken place since the open software movement.
There are quite a few big players out there: Amazon, Google, Sun, IBM, and Microsoft. New players are joining to the game day by day. Now there is even a manifesto (Open Cloud Manifesto) circulating around the techno corners: Promoting openness! Isn't it too early for a manifesto in this area? I don't know. Manifesto, standards, many companies who are willing to jump on the bandwagon, these are all good, however it may hinder the innovation in this early stage! Maybe for this type of reasons and also to protect their initial investments, some of the big companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft didn't say yes to the open cloud yet! On the other side, the impressive list of supporters (such as IBM, Aptana, SAP, EMC, VMWare, GoGrid, Red Hat, Novell, OMG etc.) of the movement is groving fast.
Is the cloud computing a big hype as some will argue, or a revolutionary new computing platform for all of us? We will see the results soon :)
