Various Cloud Computing platforms are available today. The following table contains the popular Cloud Computing platforms:
Salesforce.com : This is a Force.com development platform. This provides a simple user interface and lets users log in, build an app, and push it in the cloud.
Appistry : The Appistry’s CloudIQ platform is efficient in delivering a runtime application. This platform is very useful to create scalable and service oriented applications.
AppScale : The AppScale is an open source platform for App Engine of Google applications.
AT&T : The AT&T allows access to virtual servers and manages the virtualization infrastructure. This virtualization infrastructure includes network, server and storage.
Engine Yard : The Engine Yard is a rails application on cloud computing platform.
Cloud Computing Challenges
Cloud computing, an emergent technology, has placed many challenges in different aspects of data and information handling.
Security and Privacy : Security and Privacy of information is the biggest challenge to cloud computing. Security and privacy issues can be overcome by employing encryption, security hardware and security applications.
Portability : This is another challenge to cloud computing that applications should easily be migrated from one cloud provider to another. There must not be vendor lock-in. However, it is not yet made possible because each of the cloud provider uses different standard languages for their platforms.
Interoperability : It means the application on one platform should be able to incorporate services from the other platforms. It is made possible via web services, but developing such web services is very complex.
Reliability and Availability : It is necessary for cloud systems to be reliable and robust because most of the businesses are now becoming dependent on services provided by third-party.
Computing Performance : Data intensive applications on cloud requires high network bandwidth, which results in high cost. Low bandwidth does not meet the desired computing performance of cloud application.
