Cloud computing & Windows Azure

 

^{1. Cloud Computing}

 

Cloud computing is Internet-based ("cloud") development and use of computer technology ("computing").




The concept of cloud computing is very simple: On your desk, you would have a very low-cost computer with just a processor, a keyboard and a monitor. There would be no hard drive or CD/DVD drive. It would be hooked up to the Internet and would link to a central supercomputer, which would host all of your programs and files.

2. Products of cloud computing

Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. To be sure, Google isn't the only company invested in online storage and cloud computing. There are other services today that offer a significant amount of space and software in the cloud. Amazon's Simple Storage Service, for instance, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage ($0.15 per gigabyte per month). AOL provides a service called Xdrive with a capacity of 50 gigabytes for $9.95 per month (the first five gigabytes are free). And Microsoft offers Windows Live SkyDrive, currently in beta, with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.


3. Microsoft's Windows Azure

Microsoft's Windows Azure kicked off on October 27. Windows Azure is an operating system for cloud. Traditional OS only manages hardware of a single computer and cloud OS , Windows Azure, manages a set of connected servers and abstracts away hardware. Windows Azure provides the same facilities that a desktop OS provides, such as abstract execution environment, shared file system, resource allocation, programming environments and so on.

You can use it to install and run service and don't need to pay for hardware of servers, software of database and OS, and administrators to manage your server. You can use it to  store and retrieve data and don't need to know in which server your data is stored, just like you don't need to know in which sector of hard disk your data is stroed when you use Windows XP.

4. Recommanded cloud ressources

Google docs:
http://docs.google.com/#all

Amazon's Simple Storage Service:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Microsoft Live Mesh:
https://www.mesh.com/