Could anybody explain in plain words how Cloud computing works? I have read the Wikipedia article, but still not sure that I understand how cloud actually works.
Answer
First, to get this out of the way: Cloud Computing is a marketing buzzword and ill-defined one (at least at the moment).
I would recommend dissecting this overarching buzzword and in market segments, namely:
- IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service (e.g. Amazon EC2)
- Paas: Platform as a Service (e.g. Google AppEngine)
- DaaS: Database as a Service (e.g. Amazon RDS)
- SaaS: Software as a Service (e.g. Salesforce)
Coming back to your points:
- If you expose a Service through a Web Interface, you could classify this in the Cloud Computing bin
- Traditional Web Sites per-se would not fall in the CC category (see above segments)
- I do not know what a "Cloud Application" is: are you trying to define a new term ? ;-)