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From the Editors: Clouds in the rear-view mirror… and windshield


By SD Times News Team
January 2, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
What happened in 2008? When you get beyond the mortgage meltdown and the business slowdown, the single biggest advance may have been in cloud-based computing. In fact, the increasing attractiveness of the cloud dovetails well with 2007’s biggest trend, that of service oriented architectures, and with today’s financially challenging climate.

The cloud grew out of initiatives from famous Internet companies, like Amazon.com, Google and Saleforce.com, and over the past couple of months it has been embraced by more conventional platform players, namely Microsoft and Sun. What makes the cloud work? Web services. How does the cloud work with enterprises? Through service oriented architectures. Open specifications, whether based on WS-* or REST, are at the heart of most cloud initiatives, making the cloud-based applications relatively easy to deploy and integrate.

While SOA and standards make development teams happy, the economics make the executive suite happy. The cloud is the classic pay-as-you-go model for information technology. You don’t need to buy servers or provision a data center; you don’t need to purchase licenses for Windows Server or Oracle. Instead, you get a monthly bill that’s keyed to the amount of network traffic or the number of gigabytes of storage. What could be simpler? What could be more affordable and cost-effective?

The power of the cloud also plays well with other 2008 trends. Smart mobile devices, like the Apple iPhone or RIM BlackBerry, or based on the Google Android stack, are connected to the Internet and can be very happy working with cloud-based applications. Rich Internet clients haven’t yet been tied to the cloud, but there's no doubt that Adobe’s AIR/Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX all have a natural affinity for the cloud.

What about the software development team? Like the cloud, they’re not only location-independent, but increasingly location-irrelevant. Whether you’re playing follow-the-Sun development with offices distributed across North America, Europe and Asia, or whether you’re just trying to save a few dollars by outsourcing, cloud-based development and test platforms are readily accessible.

 Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, SOA, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Sun

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