Everyone these days is now familiar with the hype and buzz surrounding cloud computing. If you’re not, I suggest reading the Wikipedia article! The “cloud” abstracts technology, specifically the hardware from the end-user. It is useful because it means a web developer no longer has to think about disk failures or similar when developing their application – they just need to write their application to be scalable. As long as the application is written in the correct way, a disk failure won’t cause any downtime because their application is hosted on a cloud – and the “cloud” mitigates hardware failure by detecting issues as and when they happen, and migrating live virtual servers (your VDS/VPS) over to spare hardware.
Some of the big players in the market include Amazon’s EC2, Rackspace’s Cloud Servers, Flexiscale plus many others. With the release of software like Eucalyptus, it looks like the marketplace may become even more crowded as barriers to entry fall because less original development will be required to set up your own “cloud” of servers.
