Understanding the Cloud

Cloud computing is nothing new.  The concept of relying on a grid or network of online resources for computing needs has been around for decades without becoming mainstream because clouds are expensive to build and maintain.

The cloud movement gained serious traction this week as Netflix announced it will move most of its online resources to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3.

In Netflix’s case, user queues and a massive movie library will be moved over to Amazon’s servers for storage.  When you download a movie from Netflix, you will actually be receiving the information from an Amazon S3 server.

With such a high profile web-based business turning to a cloud for storage, what does this mean for the future of cloud computing?