Let us find how these skills have created demand for employment globally.

The demand for cloud computing is growing at the rate of 61% annually. In many instances the job offer placed on various online sourcing platforms has to be extended beyond 44 days which is the average display time for any job. Cloud based technologies will move businesses to the next level. Hence deployment of cloud based technologies and personnel to look after to deal with cloud based technologies are need of the hour. There are companies like HP that have launched courses to train up candidates to fill this gap. It is also important to engage competent personnel so that the services will not be disturbed for businesses.

For businesses, cloud computing will cut down their expenditure and for users it will simplify their lives. The beauty of cloud computing is its offer to utilize services as and when required and in the amounts a business can utilize. Thus, for a business it is an attractive choice. As a matter of fact, cloud is a set of hardware, software, services, storage and interfaces. This total set offers integrated services to your enterprise virtually located somewhere and running on round the clock basis. Small businesses can cut down their cost as they cannot afford to manage dedicated infrastructure and man power to achieve a very high level of service that can be offered on round the clock basis.

Growing and big businesses also can manage these services offered by third parties by involving a team of professionals who will look after the deployment and management of cloud computing services. Businesses can save substantially as they can pay only to the volume of services they are utilizing and not on a fixed basis. The companies that are providing cloud based services should gain the trust of potential clients by being able to address various security and privacy issues.

As more and more awareness is created about cloud computing among the business community, the demand raised high for people possessed with these skills. It is apparent that there is a huge gap between the available number of cloud based positions and the competent personnel available in the market. The recent boom in this direction has added fuel to the fire. Recruitment of candidates for Cloud computing is a complex task as the requirements change from one business to another business and from one location to another location.

The skills are expected not only from IT experts but also from professionals from other domains such as customer support, sales and marketing. In fact, the demand for candidates possessing cloud computing skills is more from other than IT domain. In spite of all around efforts to recruit through various online and offline sources, the gap may still widen as the requirement of professionals is increasing at 70% every year. As an alternative, companies may come up to the point of recruiting and training them up as per their requirements.

UK newspaper, The Register sources close to Microsoft, this week confirmed the rumors that circulated during the month of June where customer’s data were being striped between the pair. By the process of striping, the data accessing speed is increased and there is no need to rely on a single device or service. Sources say, that, in order to reduce the risk of depending on one single supplier, Apple has selected two providers since it already suffered from unpleasant online services from a single external service provider. It has to be noted that the level of maturity and services differ a lot when a comparison is done between Amazon and Microsoft.

A cost of approximately $1 billion would be required to build the infrastructure of cloud services. At present, Apple doesn’t have a bunch of high speed and high density servers. However, with a massive data center under construction in North Carolina, that is worth $500 million, a part of the cloud service could be taken over here. Still it surprises me, why Amazon and Microsoft are apparently mum on this subject.

In the present scenario, Apple’s technology is not well suited for a cloud type system. It is flexibility and provisioning that separates ‘Cloud’ from a just of bunch of servers. For instance, if you take a normal server host, you can get a server in a fairly short order, in case you need a bunch, you’ll have to wait for some time till the hardwares are ordered and you have to pay regardless of usage. With Amazon’s Elastic Cloud server is available in minutes and you have the option to pay more based on usage since idle resources don’t have to take up resources. Now, this is possible because it is all virtual.

They may even fix it since there was a time when they liked AIX or they may even build a data centre with someone else`s technology. This will take a lot of time and only Microsoft and Amazon are the big ones which can deliver it. So, this can be a reason for them to use Microsoft and Amazon.

Another possibility is that using AWS and Azure, they can develop a CDN (content-delivery network) since it has already used Akamai and Limelight as CDN’s in the past. This allows developers to deliver high-bandwidth content more quickly and efficiently by placing delivery points closer to users; this will essentially speed up all sorts of data transfer that go through their CDN.

When Microsoft was questioned regarding this, they replied stating that they don’t reveal the customer details. But, when it comes to ‘Cloud’ privacy is always in question. Sometimes, it baffles me where I think that since Apple runs on beta version currently and the service appears to only run in iMessage on Azure; is Apple still deciding its host platform?

Let us know, if you think differently.

Zend has launched the Simple Cloud project which allows PHP developers to write Cloud based apps without having to bother about the different cloud based solutions available. This works like an abstraction layer for various cloud solutions like Amazon, Windows Azure, Rackspace Cloud Hosting and a few more.

Initially this project aims at providing standard cross-cloud simple APIs for

• File storage- including Windows Azure blobs, Rackspace Cloud Files, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Amazon S3
• Document Storage- including Windows Azure tables and Amazon SimpleDB
• Simple Queues- including Amazon SQS and Windows Azure queues

From Zend’s press release, “Zend Cloud will also provide adapters for local services to make offline coding and testing against cloud services as easy as connected development.”

These APIs will be appearing soon on the Zend Framework as the Zend Cloud component. They will provide the basic functionality across the various cloud hosting services, but if you do need vendor specific functionality in your code, Zend Framework will provide vendor-specific libraries as well. They’ve already got Nirvanix, Amazon EC2, S3 and SQS covered. Microsoft’s proposed the WindowsAzure services for Zend Framework. IBM and Rackspace are also working with Zend to get their services covered. With these integrations in motion, they estimate that ZendCloud adapter with these features will be available in the Zend Framework by end of Q4.

An initial Simple Cloud API proposal and reference implementation is available now for community review and participation at http://www.simplecloud.org.

Links:

Zend Press Release – Zend Teams with IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace and Other Cloud Leaders on Open Source Initiative to Drive Cloud Application Development
MSDN Interoperability Blog – Microsoft, Zend and others announce Simple API for Cloud Application Services