P&P Symposium 2010 - Cloud Computing - Challenges and Opportunities - Yousef A. Khalidi

Cloud Computing – Challenges and Opportunities | Yousef A. Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Windows Azure, Microsoft

Cloud computing has the well-publicized advantages of reduced costs and increased agility. To reap these benefits, resources are typically allocated from a global large-scale computing infrastructure, highly shared among many applications and customers. This talk starts with an overview of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, as a concrete example of a large scale highly shared cloud. The talk then presents some of the challenges of cloud computing, including security, evolving applications for cloud computing, and the federation of multiple clouds. The talk explores the tension between, on one hand, the desire for reduced cost and increased agility, and on the other hand, securing applications and their data.  The talk also discusses the need to evolve the application model to truly attain the advantages of cloud computing.