WETICE 2009 First Workshop on Collaboration and Cloud Computing

Bandwidth inversion (network bandwidth becoming larger than computer internal bus bandwidth), Virtualization of computing, network and storage resources and web based service development environments are changing the way the services are developed and delivered over the Internet. Virtualization allows computing (CPU and memory), storage (capacity, storage I/O, storage throughput) and bandwidth to be shared among multiple service developers, and service delivery applications supporting both end customers (consumer market) and businesses (both small and medium enterprises). This is expected to provide massive scales of economy through consolidation, improved resource utilization, and, avoid the need for the investments by individual businesses to meet peak workloads through over-provisioning. Analogies to utility model (i.e., providing resources that are ubiquitously available, massively scalable, on-demand, pay-per-use and managed) are often invoked to compare network based access of computing and storage resources (often called the cloud) to telecommunications network or power grid. The lower affinity that the virtualization technologies provide between applications and the resources makes it possible to dynamically switch the resources based on their latency constraints and resource utilization profiles.