期刊名称：Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering
出版年度：2012
卷号：35
期号：4
出版社：IEEE Computer Society
摘要：Fuelled by the advances virtualization and high-speed network technologies, cloud computing is emergingas a dominant computing paradigm for the future. Almost all technology assessment groups such as Forresterand Gartner project very aggressive growth in cloud computing over the next decade or two. Cloud computingcan roughly be summarized as "X as a service" where X could be a virtualized infrastructure (e.g., computingand/or storage), a platform (e.g., OS, programming language execution environment, databases, web servers),software applications (e.g., Google apps), a service, or a test environment, etc. A distinguishing aspect of cloudcomputing is the utility computing model (aka pay-as-you-go model) where users get billed for the computers,storage, or any resources based on their usage with no up-front costs of purchasing the hardware/software orof managing the IT infrastructure. The cloud provides an illusion of limitless resources which one can tap intoin times of need, limited only by the amount one wishes to spend on renting the resources. Cloud computingis by no means a novel/new thought. In a recent tutorial on cloud computing at EDBT 2012, Amr Abbadi &Divy Aggrawal pointed out one of the early references to cloud computing in a speech by John McCarthy at theMIT centennial in 1961 where he states "If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers ofthe future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a publicutility The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry". While McCarthy waspossibly 40-50 years ahead in his projection, there is no doubt that the spirit of his statement is finally comingto fruition.
