Yesterday’s HYSEA event on Cloud Computing (CC) at Google office was very successful. I have presented a few academic perspectives on the usage of cloud computing as well as some research challenges in this area.
For me, there are a few interesting takeaways from this workshop:
- The importance of this area is clear from the very fact that Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun investing heavily into this and the pace at which tools, products, services and applications are being built.
- It appears that the landscape is being filled with various players focusing on their own specific sub-area. For example, Google App Engine serving the developer/programmer community, Amazon EC2 and S3 serving the application development infrastructure, and Microsoft Live Mesh focusing on consumer solutions.
- The need to create new progamming paradigms in cloud computing area is apparent, which includes creation of libraries to adopt existing programming languages to suite the CC style programming and creation of new languages for service descriptions and for monitoring (at the Service Level Agreements and beyond).
I have used the term “Cloud Sourcing” to describe the trend of delegating the software development, production and maintenance beyond the boundaries of an enterprise. It is clear that the CC playground is wide open and it will be interesting to see who will emerge as a winner. Like India emerged as a superpower in outsourcing, someone (country/region/company/…) will become a super power in Cloud Sourcing.
BTW, Hyderabad is buzzing with cloud computing activities – including a barcamp on August 30th at Amazon.com Development Center. Check it out if you are interested.
Posted by Vasudeva Varma 
Posted by Srinivasarao 
