cloud

[ankur rathi]

Hi,

We've have been hearing this word on many occasion - cloud. It's like a new buzz word in software industry.
What I understand is - you don't buy servers on your own, instead you deploy your applications on others' *big*, *ready to use/product already installed* servers (available on internet) & pay rent for it. It saves you time & cost of server. It's quite good for initial prototypes building/demoing something...

Now how this is new thing (or I've not understood cloud, may be)?

Mainframe was similar kind of thing. Companies didn't my mainframe machines as they were very costly I think, and probably security reasons were also there... They used others (IBM I guess) mainframe...

Your thoughts?

Thanks for your time!

[Campbell Ritchie]

I think you have got it right. But you don’t simply use cloud computing for development. You would probably do that on a PC in your office. You use cloud computing to host the production software.
And I think the story about mainframes is much more complicated than you think. A mainframe was a very expensive piece of equipment which required a large room and hundreds of kW of power. In the 1960s and 1970s, time‑sharing was popular; you could use part of a mainframe hosted by the computer company via a telephone line. Mini‑computers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s; they only measured about 10 × 4 × 3 feet. The “microcomputer” (including the PC) became available about the early 1980s.
There are still mainframes in use, providing very fast operation, measured in teraflops.