Cloud Computing: Support for Web Services

Cloud computing is the latest hype in the market, with articles and comments surrounding it appearing widely on the Internet; however, it suffers from the usual problem of any new hyped topic—lack of consistent definition.

All the major technology vendors state their commitment to using cloud computing as the provisioning infrastructure for computational services, and some newer vendors such as Google, Yahoo! and Amazon are joining well known vendors in offering cloud computing services as well. Steve Balmer, on behalf of Microsoft, stated that cloud computing will redefine the use of software and that Microsoft will build on cloud computing as a strategy. It is perhaps easier to define by stating the problem it solves, rather than going into the details of how individual vendors believe it can be achieved.

As enterprises find themselves making more and more changes to their Web services— often without any real idea of the number of people who may want to use these services—the old model of dedicated servers as a fixed resourcing pool that will need to be “managed” to support the changes looks more likely to be an issue.

The conceptual idea is that the supporting infrastructure that handles this should be “invisible” and “autonomic,” allowing changes in “services” to be made without the need to refer to the elements of the infrastructure layer. Thus, in the same way that complex networks hide their services—for example X.25 is always shown on drawings as a “cloud”—so also the term “cloud computing” has come to be used to illustrate a computing environment that hides the complexity of its services from those using it. ...

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August 2008
Cloud Computing: Support for Web Services

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