Vivek Kundra (the US Federal CIO) moderated a panel of experts on cloud computing yesterday at the “Cloud Computing Shootout”.
Cloud computing is a simple concept. It’s all about scalable and on-demand computing and storage. Think of the ‘cloud’ as a near infinite (for practical purposes) array of servers representing an abundance of computing power and storage space. Customers access only as much of this ‘cloud’ as they need to run their respective applications. The paradigm shift is very similar to the virtualization you may be seeing in your data center, but on a one-step back larger scale. Cloud computing is to data centers what virtualization is to individual servers.
Cloud computing is not a new concept. It’s actually been around in the internet community for quite some time. Amazon release the first widely available cloud computing services (s3 and ec2) between 2006 and 2007.
This entry is the first of a 3 part series on Cloud Computing in the Federal Government.
The two parts in this series:
