Cloud Computing. What's it all about then?

History
Cloud computing seems to be one the buzzwords of the moment, but like many IT and Internet related ideas, the concept has been around for decades. Cloud was first put forward public in connection with computing by John McCarthy back in 1961.
John McCarthy is probably the most noted computer scientist that you've never heard of. Better known to oldsters / techies as one of the driving forces behind the development of Artificial Intelligence, McCarthy, an American, is the inventor of the LISP computer programming language, a noted Turing Prize winner (1971), and one of the first to develop the use of mathematical logic to advance AI concepts. He was behind the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning, a key logic used in AI development, and was the main proponent of situation calculus (another AI related advance). So as you can see, he is an all round smart chap.

McCarthy put forward the idea that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility", a bit like the US service bureaux of the time (if you're wondering what service bureaux did, think of "outsourcing" - you see, it's all been done before). It has taken many decades for the hard ware and software to develop to the stage where Cloud is available to you. Right now.

What makes up the Cloud
Cloud basically separates the hardware, storage and basic infrastructure from the operating systems and software applications. Initially this was of interest only to very large organisations and those running mega-computing services and applications that are prone to huge fluctuations in demand or who need very high levels of availability - think of hundreds or thousands of servers, thousands or tens of thousands of applications, Terrabytes of storage over many locations.
One of the primary benefits of the Cloud is that the applications and services that run on those servers, storage and networking can become very much easier to manage and can be made highly reliable.
Because Cloud services are shared across many different pieces of hardware, in theory if you have a problem with one server, you can just shut it down and let the other servers take the strain. The end user won't see any difference. If a cloud server needs more memory, just give it more in a couple of clicks, or have it done automatically by a managed service according to predefined rules.

So what does this mean for me? Who benefits?
This is all very attractive to hosting companies, as a way of driving down their costs. As a customer, you may not see that much difference in the price, but what you should get is a better level of service. This means that if your widget site suddenly experiences an explosion in visitor traffic, your hosting company should be able to just turn on the Cloud tap for the memory, storage and bandwidth that will let your website handle the demand. Hardware problems should become less of an issue, and you should see less service interruptions.
You get the extra profit from all those those extra widget orders (of course you DO make a profit from them don't you). The hosting company gets an extra revenue from you by charging for all that additional memory, storage etc. Of course widgets could just as well be news items, blogs or any other content, application or service you care to offer.
So you get many of the benefits of a big computing infrastructure without having to pay all the overhead of running your own.

Where can I get it?
You might have noticed that in the low end, managed server market, virtual servers (think of these as Cloud-lite) are now offered as an alternative or instead of a dedicated server offering. So the chances are your ISP or hosting company is offering a Cloud-lite type service now. Amazon have been offering Cloud since 2005 - an age ago in computing terms. They have only recently really got to grips with the low end SME service offering, but this is starting to look like a mature service.
So if you want your website and services to have big computing bang for your buck, quid or Euro, it's there for the taking.

Advertorial - of course DynASP is offering Cloud services right now.