A Brief about the brewing Cloud Idea
The much-hyped and hoped cloud paradigm is seeing an unprecedented adoption and adaption across the globe. The path-breaking cloud idea is actually a smart and sensible combination, convergence and cluster of several proven and promising technologies such as consolidation, virtualization, optimization, federation, service orientation (SO), and an array of computing paradigms such as cluster, grid, on-demand, and utility computing. The complete and compact automation of several complicated IT infrastructure, application, service and data management and maintenance tasks is the key differentiator.
There are some recurring tasks such as job scheduling, resource provisioning, expansion and contraction of cloud resources, workload management, virtual machine creation and control, self-servicing, etc. and these are being automated for the upswing of the pioneering cloud technology. The noteworthy aspect is that cloud infrastructures fulfill myriad quality attributes (Non-functional requirements such as scalability / elasticity, availability, affordability, adaptability, amenability, alacrity, high performance etc.). The cloud paradigm has come as a boon and blessing for enterprise IT as it could introduce and incorporate a series of innovations and improvisations there in order to realize the target of business-IT alignment.
Cloud is undoubtedly the foremost technology that has the wherewithal to effectively accomplish the long-standing needs such as IT agility, autonomy and affordability. Due to the inherent harmonization with service oriented architecture (SOA), an offshoot of the popular and pervasive service orientation (SO), the goal of establishing adaptive, lean, and instant-on enterprises is to see the reality soon. Several IT concerns, constraints and challenges are being easily tackled by the cloud paradigm in sync up with other enterprise-scale technologies.
Next-Generation Cloud Computing
Any promising technology or paradigm is to evolve continuously. Issues and limitations are being identified, potential solutions are being conceived and constructed, and newer techniques are being explored, experimented and expounded. There are different directions and dimensions in the holistic journey of cloud. The extraordinary success of cloud computing in the enterprise space is being spectacularly leveraged and replicated in the vast and varied embedded space. All kinds of physical and embedded devices are being connected and linked up with clouds inducing a kind of deeper and deft connectivity among disparate, distributed, and decentralized devices enabling elegant and exotic applications.
Newer cloud types, models, applications and services are being formulated to keep up the cloud momentum. Sensor, device, knowledge, science, service clouds etc are being given newer thrusts these days. Cloud brokerage services comprising cloud integration, composition and intermediation aspects are fast-emerging due to the huge movement across the cloud spectrum. Cloud, being a generic technology, is bound to raise a storm of advancements and accomplishments across a variety of domains in the days to unfold. .In other words, the cloud space is all set to join as the third major force along with the enterprise and web spaces in accurately understanding peoples' needs, conceiving, conceptualizing and concretizing the identified requirements in the form of services and applications that can be delivered unobtrusively to the right people at the right time at the right place. Thus there is a close linkup between cloud and people IT. Cloud is bringing the much-needed transition from the expensive IT to elastic, elegant and finally exotic IT. The cloud space is seeing much more value and verve as entrepreneurs, employees and executives are on the knowhow of the interruptive, disruptive and transformative nature of cloud technology.
What is Cloud Foundry?
Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.The key value additions are
Developer Productivity — Build applications with your choice of high productivity frameworks and application services.
Open System — Choose your framework, choose your cloud, choose your application services.
Faster Delivery — Shorten the time it takes to take your application from concept, to code, to the cloud using an open platform as a service
Initially Cloud Foundry will be available as
CloudFoundry.com — a complete hosted PaaS environment
CloudFoundry.org — an open source project where developers and community members can collaborate and contribute to the project.
Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud — a complete instance of the Cloud Foundry project ideally suited for developer’s desktops, will be forthcoming
