So I have been playing around with the world of virtualization and cloud computing. Now, a lot of developers out there might be daunted by this unknown world. But the truth is this: Cloud computing is old! We have been using it for a while now without even realizing it.

Don’t believe me? For the Mac users out there, have you tried using Mobile Me? Or how about the “I ? Google” people out there? How long have you been using Gmail, and Google Calendars, or even Google Docs? These applications all use cloud computing to save every last one of your emails, messages, music, documents etc, that you upload and send through these applications.

Now for those of you saying, “Yeah I know what Cloud is I have a couple Linux and Windows VMs on my computer.” VMs are only a piece of the pie. Cloud computing can be defined as:

“Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services). These resources can be dynamically reconfigured to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for a n optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is typically exploited by a pay-per-use model in which guarantees are offered by the Infrastructure Provider by means of customized SLAs.”

So… What am I doing? I signed up for a free account at https://aws.amazon.com/ and then all their individual cloud products. Then I downloaded the Eclipse Java SDK toolkits here, and started plugging away and creating elements on the cloud dynamically.

If you write any neat code feel free to email it and I’ll upload it here