User:Tom/Clouds - An Introduction

The Cloud Revolution

A revolution in computing has occurred over the last decade (2000-2010). Maturing technologies for virtualizing software systems and runtimes have severed the historical dependcy between software applications and operating systems from the physical compute resources that run them, introducing high levels of flexibility, efficiency, and scalability to computing infrastructure.

Flexibility is improved as incremental hardware acquisition, deployment, setup and installation has become a "virtual" process instead of a laborious physical process. With a virtualized infrastructure in place, a new virtual machine can be provisioned simply and instantly. Just as importantly it can be de-provisioned or switched to a new operating system or application purpose with similar ease.

Efficiency is enhanced as hardware resources and computing power are no longer quantized to physical hardware - in which isolated computers rn largely idle - but can be allocated at a more granular level for maximum utilization. A single blade server may now run more than a single virtual machine - reducing the unused compute power by alllocating it to other applications.

Cloud Native:

PaaS Platform as a Service SaaS Software as a Service