When I first heard about cloud computing I was wondering if it was really worth the fancy terminology. To me it was just a marketing term for hosted applications. My first experience started three years ago when I moved my Website’s email from my hosting provider to Google Apps. At that point of time I never knew it was Cloud computing or specifically SaaS I was moving too. To me Google Apps was much better than my hoster’s email due to reduced downtime.
As usual it requires media hype for me to look back what things actually are. One’s own knowledge is the hurdle to learn new things. Over confident of knowing what it is I didn’t really track the developments though I keep hearing people discuss. But that’s also the problem with SaaS, it is difficult to see any difference.
It was Google App Engine that made me rethink. Though I registered my first application long back, only recently did I try to deploy my first application (‘Hello World’ of course). A small program but it still brought me a lot of insight to what things are. As a solution provider I wonder how this technology is going to change the world of computing. Though there is a big crowd out there harping on security issues on the cloud I don’t really see them as issues. It is only for the cloud consultants and the security companies to market their businesses.
I really admire the PaaS of Cloud Computing. My library application was on the shelves for a long time due to lack of time and build custom application accessible from the internet and also integrating it to my drupal powered website. With Zoho creator it is just a few clicks and four hours (to upload data) on a weekend, Wow! the application is up online. Integration with drupal? don’t worry la! Embedding the form on a drupal page is just that simple (https://shankarananth.com/site/index.php?q=node/49)
The biggest thing that would change the way people think at cloud computing is the time one spends on hardware and software maintenance. A chemical engineer and a solution provider I feel annoyed on more of my time being spent on fixing these issues rather than focus on my core competence.
Cloud computing is the definitely next big thing!
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