Grid Computing News : Cloud Computing: Hot Air or Killer App?

Cloud computing has become a huge buzz-phrase in the past few months, but you'd be forgiven for not knowing what the term really means. Both imply data centers filled with computing resources available over the network, so are they, in fact, the same thing. You pay for what you consume, without worrying about how where it comes from or how much is available. Customers create their own Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) containing an operating system, applications and data, and they control how many instances of each AMI run at any given time. "Cloud-based computing is a type of IT service usually delivered over the Internet, but the defining characteristic is scale — the ability to service millions of users," said Matt Cain, a research vice president at Gartner.... read more