Integrating with the cloud

Cloud computing is a fairly broad term referring to the global trend of moving in-house or on-premise servers and even servers owned by a company and hosted in a web farm to a fully hosted service solution. The difference between traditional hosting and cloud hosting is, in the first case, you manage hardware with an operating system and application software running on it, while in the cloud scenario, you use software services, regardless of the hardware infrastructure. In other words, rather than paying for hardware, electricity, web connectivity, and perpetual or yearly software licenses, you pay for a service per minute (or at times even millisecond) of use, by traffic volume, or by some use quota. The huge advantage of cloud services is the ability to scale them up very rapidly when there is more demand and scale them down when not needed so that you end up paying proportionally to the actual usage, rather than having to allocate a large amount of resources...