1st Introduction

Over the last few years we have seen grid computing evolve from a niche technology associated with scientific and technical computing, into a business-innovating technology that is driving increased commercial adoption. Grid deployments accelerate application performance, improve productivity and collaboration, and optimize the resiliency of the IT infrastructure.

Today, the maturity of the Virtualization technologies, both at the VM and at the IT infrastructure levels, and the convergence of the Grid, Virtualization and SOA concepts, enables the business implementation of the Cloud Computing for utility and SaaS services.

At last, the Grid Computing vision becomes a reality:  we've gotten used to consuming electricity on-demand from an electrical outlet; we can now get applications, computing and storage services from the network, on-demand. We can dynamically scale our computation and storage power, at no time, and we pay only for what we use. This is going to change the marketplace as we know it.

What is Cloud Computing? (Videos)

http://tinyurl.com/kse4nh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplXnFUlPmg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms&fmt=22

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg&NR=1

Geeting started with Cloud Computing
http://library.dzone.com/sites/all/files/refcardz/rc082-010d-cloud-computing.pdf

Examples:
Amazon AWS
http://aws.amazon.com/

Google Apps Engine
http://code.google.com/appengine/

Microsoft Azure Services Platform
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

SUN
http://www.sun.com/solutions/cloudcomputing/

HP
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11^40898_4000_100__&jumpid=go/cloudassure

Amazon Web Services Health Summary
http://cloudstatus.com/

Related events
http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing/web/cloud-computing-events