Cloud computing is rapidly emerging as the new computing paradigm of the coming decade. The idea of virtualizing not just hardware, but software resources as well, has attracted the attention of academics as well as the technological industry. Cloud computing not only offers a viable solution to addressing scalability and availability problems for large-scale applications, but also displays the promise of sharing resources to reduce cost for the consumers. The concept has evolved over the years, starting from data centers to present day infrastructure virtualization. Although there is not a standard for cloud hosting, there are many different companies that have designed what they believe is the solution to the current scalability problems.

Cloud hosting, as now, covers all walks of computing. Designing and standardization of the cloud, virtualization of storage, virtualization of the computing infrastructure as a whole, integration of the applications into the virtual world, assembling and using cloud services, building enterprise applications on the cloud computing platform, developing security models for the cloud, self-virtualization of devices, exchange of data/messaging in the cloud, high availability architectures for the cloud, providing QoS for web applications on the cloud, high performance computing using elastic resources and optimization and performance issues of web applications on the cloud are a few of the multitude of challenges and opportunities that the cloud computing world opens up. Everything that will come in the next couple years will help to further technology and to lower the cost to the end consumer. I’m excited for what is to come in the future!