What is cloud computing and virtualization?

explain in detail...What is cloud computing and virtualization?
Cloud computing is the idea that, instead of having a computer with all your programs, data and information, you will have a computer with access to the 'cloud' which could be any network, most often the internet, and your data and programs will be provided as 'services' by companies on the network.

All of the software and data will be hosted on servers and you will access it through a service such as your web browser. This means that the server uses all the RAM and processing power and the growth of the power of home computers could become slower, as we will not need so much power on our home systems.



Some software, such as the netbook O/S Jolicloud already targets this, and we are seeing many desktop programs make use of web services online, allowing you to see sites such as Flickr and Facebook without opening your browser.



Virtualisation had many different meanings, the one you want here is setting up a desktop that is away from the actual hardware itself, applied to cloud computing, having your files on your desktop actually hosted on a web server miles away; they are only virtually on your desktop.

Hope that makes sense.What is cloud computing and virtualization?
Virtualization refers to being able to run multiple instances of operating systems on a single piece of hardware. For example, using VMWare, Microsoft Virtual Server, or HyperV, you can partition your computer to install Windows XP, Vista, and Linux at the same time. This is different from dual-booting / multi-booting, because all operating systems run concurrently on a shared hardware system. How many partitions you can create is solely dependent upon how beefy your hardware is (CPU's memory, disk, etc.)



VMWare and Microsoft make versions of their products (VMWare server, Virtual PC, Virtual Server, etc.) available for free to anyone who wants to download it. HyperV is a Microsoft virtualization technology that is built into Windows 2008 at the kernel level.



Virtualization saves hardware, maintenance, and energy costs, hence there is a big push for using this technology from environment-friendly (green) companies.



Checkout Microsoft Virtualization at:

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/



Cloud computing refers to hosting your applications and/or data on the Internet. For example, Amazon.com sells a service which you can use to create a database on their servers and access it using any application (whether or not it's an Internet application) via web services. You never need to worry about how much database space you need, or maintaining your database (backups, etc.) because Amazon takes care of it for you. They also sell a service that allows you queuing of data like MSMQ or MQ Series. You can also create your applications such that they are hosted on Windows or Linux servers at Amazon. If your application gets popular and needs more power, a simple API call to Amazon can scale your application easily by increasing the number of servers it is hosted on.



Cloud computing has made possible for startups to venture into large applications without much upfront investment into data centers, etc. and build applications that are virtually infinitely scalable. Cloud computing sometimes uses virtualization as the underlying technology.



Checkout Amazon web services at:

http://aws.amazon.com/



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