Understanding the Cloud

Why Cloud Hosting is Relevant to Business
Cloud computing architectures have the ability to scale to suit user demand and traffic spikes quickly. Developers don't have to constantly re-engineer their environment and cost structures to handle peak loads. Businesses don't have to wrestle with the underlying infrastructure and core technologies or the day-to-day operational, performance and scalability issues of their platform. Instead, with cloud computing, they can truly focus their resources on developing their applications and sites.

Technologies Behind a Cloud
Numerous underlying technologies can be incorporated into the basic architecture of the Cloud. The Internet, of course, is a common thread. And in most cases, clouds are built upon virtualization technologies, like VMware and Xen, or scalable architectures based on semi-dedicated managed hosting models or grids. Usually, public clouds (not in-house environments) utilize control panels and configuration management applications, much like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). These facilitate application development activities and make raw technology readily consumable. Cloud computing environments typically provide access to LAMP and Windows stacks, web hosting and database technologies.

Limitless Scaling in the Cloud
In theory, cloud computing architectures are limitless. In practice, however, the size of a particular cloud footprint, the size of a cloud's data center, and the reliability and scalability of the underlying technology (network access, bandwidth, peering, etc.) all affect scalability. And they must be taken into account to properly assess the capacity of any specific cloud. For practical purposes, most cloud providers offer enough scalability to successfully accommodate even the most massive spikes in usage or traffic.

Running Applications and Technologies on the Cloud
Since the Cloud is an architecture, theoretically almost anything can run on it. In reality, some cloud technologies, by design, are more suited to parallel or shared processing applications. Others are more suited to intensive single-threaded applications. Properly constructed clouds resolve this issue by leveraging the performance characteristics of each technology and implementing a mix of industry standard interfaces and custom integrations or applications to make the dissimilar technologies operate and scale smoothly.