I’ve recently attended several Cloud Computing forums and panels, and the general feeling throughout most of the audience has been that the promise of Cloud Computing sounds great, but many organizations are still apprehensive about moving to a public cloud such as Amazon’s EC2. This is understandable given security concerns and just the general feeling of a lack of control, so the concept of private clouds  becomes a great solution. It allows organizations to use the power of Cloud Computing without ever leaving the friendly confines of their own data center. There are many products that enable this such as VMWare’s vShere and the open source product Eucalyptus with many more on the way. When you look at this architecturally, this really is the next generation of virtualization giving administrators more power to efficiently use their physical resources.

The other interesting trend was the types of applications organizations are considering for use in the cloud. While there is much talk about replatforming existing application onto Cloud Computing infrastructures, many organizations seem to people getting their feet wet with new applications. They seem to be fairly traditional applications and not leveraging the elasticity of the cloud and they are just leveraging the financial benefits of not needed to procure new hardware. This trend show a lot of great promise for PostgreSQL given that Oracle does not have a favorable licensing model in virtualized environments. While Oracle is expensive in traditional environments, much of the cost benefits are eroded when Oracle is needed in a cloud environment. This is leading many people to open source solutions and PostgreSQL is a natural fit for many Oracle users.