I was recently asked about Cloud Computing, the new shiny star of the business buzzword competition. My favorite articles about the topic are By Ian Foster, The register, Wired and BBC. The cloud checklist is also nice.

Since I spent the last years in the Grid community, Cloud Computing sounds like the first real business model for Grid technology in my ears. In other words: Industry hopefully can stop now to sell every distributed middleware as Grid (“Oracle 10G”).

The over-utilized ’software as a service’ term could now come true for distributed computation and data storage middleware. This kind of software should be no longer installed and maintained by possible users. Instead, they buy the needed capacities from a ‘cloud provider’. This leads more or less automatically to all the nice problems people tackled in Grids for the last years: data management and transfer, error handling in distributed computation, standardized interfaces, and so on … It makes every serious Grid researcher automatically to a Cloud Computing expert

My favorite examples are Sun and Amazon, which already provide computational and storage resources on-demand. Google seems to concentrate on the programming models. And I bet that IBM will come up (as usual) with the (of course impressive) mainframe technology in this context. So, everybody will find a home in the cloud …