Cloud Computing: An Overview

Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and others have built large, purpose-built architectures to support their applications and taught the rest of the world how to do massively scalable architectures to support compute, storage, and application services. Cloud computing is about moving services, computation and/or data - for cost and business advantage - off-site to an internal or external, location-transparent, centralized facility or contractor. By making data available in the cloud, it can be more easily and ubiquitously accessed, often at much lower cost, increasing its value by enabling opportunities for enhanced collaboration, integration, and analysis on a shared common platform.