The practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.
The development of the Internet from being document centric via semantic data towards more and more services was described as "dynamic web".[25] This contribution focused in particular in the need for better meta-data able to describe not only implementation details but also conceptual details of model-based applications.
The present availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented architecture, and autonomic and utility computing have led to a growth in cloud computing.
The latest innovations in cloud computing are making our business applications even more mobile and collaborative, similar to popular consumer apps like Facebook and Twitter. As consumers, we now expect that the information we care about will be pushed to us in real time, and business applications in the cloud are heading in that direction as well. With Cloud 2, keeping up with your work is as easy as keeping up with your personal life on Facebook.
With cloud computing, you eliminate those headaches because you’re not managing hardware and software—that’s the responsibility of an experienced vendor like salesforce.com. The shared infrastructure means it works like a utility: You only pay for what you need, upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy.
Azure Cloud Services provides the most effective application environment for building the most modern, distributed, computing applications on the planet. Your customers will benefit from apps that respond faster and never go down.
Azure provides a number of capabilities that help you better understand the health of your applications. You can monitor the health and availability of your applications via health metrics dashboard. You can set up alert rules to be notified when your service availability is degraded. Further, with alerts and notifications, you can define an event of interest that occurs in your application, be notified in real-time when the event occurs. Health and availability monitoring, and alerting are available at no additional cost while in preview.
You have the freedom to select the Amazon EC2 instance type that is optimal for your application based on CPU and memory requirements, and can choose from several available database options. For example, you can specify a deployment consisting of high-memory instances if your web application has a large memory footprint.
Elastic Beanstalk runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters, and provides an environment where developers can run applications requiring high durability and availability.
>> Cloud service for Windows azure for Microsoft.
>> Amazon cloud service
>> Amazon Web Services (AWS)