Cloud Computing Learning Resources
We are currently at the start of a revolution in computing. In the next few years all of us will be programming in the cloud. Currently, the cloud computing platforms are under development at major software and internet companies: Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, etc. In the next few months the picture will become clearer. When these platforms become available we will post tutorials, samples, eLearning Modules, etc. To get ready for this new age, I suggest that you do your homework before hand. To get started first you need to read up on the cloud computing theory and then focus on the practical aspects of cloud programming.
Of all the discriptions of Cloud Computing we have read, the one that matched best with our vision is
by Bill Gates and we think it is also there vision for
Windows Azure:
Also in the Internet today, if you want to build an application that's going to be very high scale and very reliable, you're basically having to reinvent everything to do that. The vision is that people should be able to just subscribe to a service that takes care of that for them.
Now, no one is offering that today. Amazon offers raw computing with EC2, they offer raw storage with S3, but they don't offer a scalable model where you just basically write the app and then it scales infinitely. You have to do all the technical work still, because it's basically a UNIX machine is the paradigm.
The idea of cloud services that take care of fault tolerance, load balancing, and then let any kind of startup just have it be auto-hosted, and then, fine, if they're popular they pay a little bit for the capacity that is used, but they don't have to do some brilliant engineering design.
... developers upload their code into the platform itself, which is where that code runs. As a developer ..., you don't need your own servers, your own storage, your own database, your own bandwidth, nothing... in fact, often, all you will really need is a browser. The platform itself handles everything required to run your application on your behalf.
Here's what's magical: the level of technical expertise required of someone to develop (software)... drops by at least 90%, and the level of money they need drops to $0. Which opens up development to a universe of people...
I think that kids coming out of college over the next several years are going to wonder why anyone ever built apps for anything other than "the cloud" -- the Internet -- and, ultimately, why they did so with anything other than the... (cloud) platforms that we as an industry are going to build over the next several years -- just like they already wonder why anyone runs any software that you can't get to through a browser.