What is cloud computing?

I hear this talked about where it's like virtual world computing and limitless memory, almost sounds like science fiction.What is cloud computing?
Using your computer only as a portal to access applications, processing, and storage at a remote (online) location.



Essentially, no programs are installed on your machine, and it has a hard drive only large enough to store the operating system (which is pretty much just a web browser).



All of your applications are online, like Google Apps, and all processing and storage of files are done at online servers.



An Operating System that uses this computing method is gOS Cloud found here:



http://www.thinkgos.com/cloud/index.html



This is the next generation of computing, and it is getting foothold though netbooks. As netbooks start to reduce hard drive size (small SSD drives) people will begin to move more and more towards a world of cloud computing.



Google is releasing a Cloud based Operating system very soon as well.



Edit: I wanted to add, this is really not a new technology. This system was used in the early days of the web in the form of "Dumb" terminals. Computing labs at Universities (including mine) used to have labs set up of computer terminals that only consisted of a monitor and an keyboard. They all networked into a large Unix Mainframe and all programs, internet, and storage were done through the Mainframe.What is cloud computing?
Yes, science fiction is a good anology. Based way to think about is like client server computing, or server side scripting but you don't actually know which server and resources are being used.



It can be extended, if designed properly, to spread your work across as many servers as required to do it. So, if you have a massive job or a simple one, the cloud infrastructure assigns your work to the resources necessary to process it.



Kind of like if you run a game on your local PC, but you don't have enough disk or memory to run it, it automatically borrows from others on your network.



As you can imagine it's implementation is a lot more complex than that. Security, resource management and sharing, scheduling, failure of systems, redundancy, etc. all play a big role.