A year ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even on the radar. Now it’s everywhere. Microsoft is doing it, Amazon is doing it, IBM is doing it, Google is doing it, Sun is doing it, Apple is doing it, HP is doing it, everyone is doing it.
We thought this would be interesting in relation to the decreasing search trend for “web hosting” that we spoke about in our previous post.
Take a look at this search volume graph for the term “cloud computing” from Google Trends. Interest is soaring.
So we know that “the cloud” is very in right now. But what exactly is cloud computing? The term is currently a bit fuzzy around the edges (just like a cloud, one could say… 😉 ).
The Rightscale blog has a pretty good summary of the situation, partially quoted below (emphasis added by us):
It looks like pretty soon all computing will be called cloud computing, just because the cloud is “in.” Fortunately most computer savvy folks actually have a pretty good idea of what the term ‘cloud computing’ means: outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the internet, etc.
That post has a good breakdown of the different aspects of the cloud computing concept that you may want to have a look at if you’re interested.
Buzz and hype aside, we really like this trend. Once developers are able to host their applications without being too bothered about the underlying infrastructure or scaling issues (though of course, scaling always becomes an issue at some point), this should produce a boost in services offered on the web. This is going in the right direction as far as we are concerned.
