Per IDC, the shift to CC is "inevitable", driven by the promise of reduced TCO in a recession and "the ease and speed of deployment". Anyone involved in CC has realised this by now, but the use of "inevitable" is a first from the analysts, to my experience.
What is also remarkable about this entry is the confused definition of CC. Indeed, CC overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid computing and virtualization, and whilst there is an ongoing convergence of CC and virtualization capabilities, the two are quite different. CC is a broader concept than virtualization and relates to the underlying architecture in which services are designed.
When one really thinks about it, CC is In essence distributed computing. An application is built using the resource from multiple services potentially from multiple locations - accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource. The underlying hardware and software of networking is of course still there but there are now higher level service capabilities available used to build applications. Behind the services are data and compute resources. A user of the service doesn’t necessarily care about how it is implemented, what technologies are used or how it’s managed - only that there is access to it and has a level of reliability necessary to meet the application requirements.
CC manages multiple infrastructures across multiple organizations and consists of one or more frameworks overlaid on top of the infrastructures tying them together. This is an abstraction of resources that maintains and manages itself - of course, there are traditional IT resources to keep hardware, operation systems and networking in proper order - from the perspective of a user or application developer, though, only the Cloud is referenced.
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