Computing and storage in the cloud

IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article here comparing various “cloud” computing resources, with an emphasis on open source alternatives.

The main names in this space are Amazon, with their “Elastic Compute Cloud“; Google, with their “App Engine“; and Microsoft, with the very recently launched “Azure” platform. Of the three, Amazon looks to me to provide the best balance between completeness of functionality and ease of use. Azure provides access to the full Microsoft technology stack, but doesn’t seem to provide easy monetization mechanisms; Google looks very low friction to get going, but is currently restricted to Python (soon to include Java, but with restricted library support)  and a Google entity based data store.

The IBM article mentions a number of other services, and provides brief overviews and comparisons.

I would be interested to know if CRM users are starting to consider cloud based resources for temporary or permanent storage of extracts from their CRM databases. It might be interesting to add an Amazon or Google driver to Inaport and see if any creative uses emerge…

Regards

David