Living on Cloud 1001

This session attempts to dispel some of the fog surrounding cloud computing. We’ll define what “cloud” actually means, and then go on to look at the two primary architectures available for cloud-based deployment: the virtual-machine model (as characterised by Amazon’s EC2 service) and the application-server model (as characterised by Google’s App Engine), and look at the general cloud infrastructure provided by both Amazon and Google. We’ll finish up with a quick discussion of how cloud applications differ from other applications, and the sorts of programming problems that are unique to cloud apps.