Cloud computing has become a very fashionable topic in the last 12 to 18 months as Google Trends illustrate:

Everything is going the cloud way they say. I have to admit it is quite interesting an idea, in theory at least. Hardware as service : you only pay for what you need. Plus, you get easy scalability – well, providing that your software stack scales too -. So if you are a small to medium size company with a few online services, Amazon EC2 would most probably be more cost-effective than having your own data-center. If you are a company with heavy online services then I would imagine your CTO would look twice before agreeing to rely on a third-party company for your entire hardware infrastructure.

On the same topic, Spring Source (now part of VMware) recently announced the availability of an Enterprise Java Cloud. It reminded me of an article I read on The Server Side.  Apart from the dodgy title, the author makes an interesting point about cloud computing solutions with integrated software stacks which seems to be where Spring Source is positioning itself.

We will see how the technology evolves and whether cloud computing is just another buzzword.