Technology Behind Cloud

Lots of people believe that cloud is a technology, and I don't believe the same, like many other people. Being a technical person, my strong belief is that it’s just a business term explaining how customer spends the money and how vendors earn the money. As compared to old days hosting service providers cloud also provides similar services, it’s just that those are flexible and you do not pay fixed amount for the same.

Then if we think about technology behind it can be virtualization like in case of Amazon, Rackspace or sharing of process space like Azure, Heroku or sharing of resources using custom frameworks like Salesforce.com, google.

Amazon, Rackspace gives you the ability to host your software over the virtual machine that can be created on demand, which may be using EC2 API on Amazon or RackConnect, OpenStack API on Rackspace. Every service they offer, in combination forms a virtual network over the cloud. You can plan for on demand or reserve instances with different billing and buy static storage, VM Snapshot capability, independent storage, load balancer etc. So, mainly if you have bigger systems to be hosted, it is more cost effective.

Azure, Heroku and many other brings ability for small industries to host their web application in shared hosting environment in such a way that they no longer need application server instead scalability is created by virtually creating multiple webservers and worker processes (Worker role & web role for Azure and web dyno and worker dyno on Heroku). Interesting part is to learn how they manage dynamic instance creation and security by jailing of process. The only biggest problem in fitting your existing solution for this platform is to converting the state full application into stateless as their routing engine does not support for sticky session. Other than this few minor changes to application makes your existing app ready for the cloud. The real fun is reducing the billing by utilizing less CPU, bandwidth and so on. Both have their huge collection of applications available on their own marketplace, which can be installed and configured with few clicks to help your business get moving.

Now google provides the similar framework where you can build your own application using given framework and host it within their echo system. This makes them different.

Salesforce really stands as different platform and still people name it as CRM. I would agree that initially Salesforce.com was just a CRM with some customization capability but with the time and introduction of Force.com platform, they have made a huge difference to the industry. Multiple acquisitions, keep adding further capabilities keeps them no.1 innovative company (as per Forbes).

What difference they add to the industry? They have just brought up a Java based framework that uses Oracle as backend and store every data from every customer into a single table. Single table? Yes, I mean it :). The custom indexers written for optimizations, SOQL/SOSL to search within this table or indexes are actually nothing but a parser that expands your query into Oracle queries, Apex gets converted to Java Code in the runtime. Is that all, no! there are many features that you can build using just a click.