Cloud Computing is the new big wave in the Information technology industry, but it is an amorphous term that is commonly misunderstood. I talk to people everyday who are confused by the Cloud, but Cloud Computing is simply a shared computing resource and has actually been part of the IT landscape for many years. The Cloud Computing ecosystem can be split into three categories, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS can be considered the first major breakthrough in what is considered Cloud Computing today with services such as Salesforce.com and email hosting like Gmail and Hotmail. PaaS evolved out of the success of successful SaaS offering and spawned platforms allowing users to enhance SaaS offerings with platforms like the Google App Engine and Force.com. The latest category of Cloud Computing of IaaS is driving the  excitement. This includes Storage Clouds and most importantly Compute Clouds. Compute Clouds are shared environments providing virtualized Operating Systems allowing users a platform to deploy applications with greater control over the resources and the ability to deploy the applications of their choice.  These Compute Clouds are where PostgreSQL can be used to back any sort of application you would run inside a traditional data center. These different types of Clouds and the use of the common Cloud Computing terminology among them leads to the confusion of what Cloud Computing really is and ultimately leads to the common question I hear “Does PostgreSQL run in the Cloud?”…Of course it does…

Tags: cloud, postgres, postgresql

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, postgresql. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.