The answer to the above question is ‘Yes’—if
you’ve ever searched the web using a search engine like
Google. The search engine takes a set of search terms from you,
searches its index of web pages, and returns a list of matches as
the search result.
The process—which is essentially a piece of
software—runs on one or more computers connected to the
Internet cloud somewhere in the world. As a user, you would have no
idea where it is. This is the essence of cloud computing—the
ability of using a piece of software productively without knowing
the physical machine that is actually running it.
Lately, cloud computing services are receiving lot of attention
primarily due to the advancement of technology in two specific
categories:
• Parallelization: The ability to split
a software task across many machines and seamlessly add or remove
machines from the task
• Virtualization: The ability to split
one physical machine into multiple virtual machines and ensure that
they run independently of each other