DECEMBER 14, 2009

Cloud computing promises a lot: access to large-scale virtualized computing and storage, 24/7 availability and costs associated solely with the resources used.

The cloud is recognized to have started in 2006 with Amazon Web Service's (AWS) introduction of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Incredibly innovative, this service, when combined with the Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), enabled developers to start virtual machine images and consume storage as a service, where billing was done on per-hour and per-gigabyte rates.

These services were the start of what is now recognized as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Currently, managed hosting companies, including GoGrid and Rackspace, are integrating IaaS capabilities to provision external resources dynamically. It's expected that more providers will follow Amazon's lead.

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