The Future is in the Cloud

Microsoft is changing tracks: the software giant now sees the importance of web-based services ,even though some of these edges have been around for a while already.

 

Windows 7 certainly got its fair share of attention when it was first shown off,but another announcement made by the microsoft at the same time might just turn out to be a lot more important.At the annual professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, the company’s new chief architect Ray Ozzie introduced Microsoft’s agenda for the coming years.The group wants to capture the Internet market

with new platforms and services,and Ozzie underscored the historical  significance of the move by saying “It’s the transformation of our software; it’s the transformation of our strategy and our offerings across the board to fundamentally embrace services”. The vehicle which take Microsoft on that transformational journey , he revealed,is Windows Azure a new “cloud computing “ platform designed to offer users access to computing applications on any Internet-connected device from anywhere on planet.

What is cloud computing?

Users traditionally use softwares installed on their terminals , whether these are desktop PCs,laptops,cellphones or other devices.For bussines and enterprise scenarios ,individual servers or racks of them operate behind the scenes ,depending on the type of applications they need to support and the scale of the organization.When these companies have millions of customers who uses their websites and online services,they need to maintain massive data centres to ensure constant speed and uptime(which might involve multiple physical locations around the world).
The web is fast becoming the primary contact of contact for businesses,which means they can’t go offline when demand peaks.For example a shopping site that can’t deal with a spike in traffic during a holiday season will go offline ,causing massive business looses as well as customer dissatisfaction.On the flip side ,investments in processing power of this magnitude will not always be worthwhile .If it’s night time in North America,servers there are almost idle whereas those in India are under full load since it is day time here.

                                                   With cloud computing ,processing loads can be easily redistributed between idle servers.By hosting applications on a platform that consists of millions of distributed centres around the world rather than a single server ,customers don’t have to worry about uptime,latency,capacity,power supply,or even natural disasters and geopolitical events .Paying for only the server capacity you need means you can scale your infrastructure requirements fairly easily,based on peaks and valleys in user demand.Meanwhile the hosts of cloud use advanced virtualisations techniques to host multiple clients ,but not necessarily on individual machines or in single physical locations.This greatly optimizes space,power consumption and overall costs , and works out particularly well for small start-ups which don’t know how much demand their services can cope with and how much power they must purchase at the outset .Some might even need to rent bursts of power to analyze complex simulations every now and then.the cloud automatically provides them with required capacity also redistributes load evenly…………