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.

Cloud Native:

PaaS Platform as a Service SaaS Software as a Service