Utilizing cloud services is one way in improving your company’s business. The World Wide Web delivers a lot of services to both business and consumer that makes it very dependable to use. The popularity of using cloud services has increased over the years, mainly due to the fact that it is flexible, reliable, easily accessible, extensive and affordable.
Cloud Computing and Sevices can be pretty confusing for a first timer, so let us enumerate some of the options of Cloud Computing. Let us also include the most popular companies offering the respective services (although these companies are not limited to providing the specified service).
* Software as a Service (SaaS) is an option where instead of expecting the user to install the application software, the user is able to access it through the internet. It is a centralized form of service. A popular provider is Salesforce.com.
* Platform as a Service (PaaS) is much like SaaS, although the user has given more control of his application. It provides complete support for the building and execution of the application. Known Providers are 10gen and Google AppEngine.
* Tool as a Service (TaaS) offers online tools needed by users, while guiding them about its usage. An example is Amazon’s Simple DB, which helps users in the indexing of data to simplify its storage and access

* Hardware as a Service (HaaS) may work as licensing for managing services, while can also be a vendor for pay-per-use. Such is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Service providers offer guidelines, procedures and even hands-on help especially for first timers. Those who would opt for these services are guaranteed to have a satisftying experience.
Posted on December 31, 2008
Hi, thanks for the article. I just wanted to mention a couple additional things about 10gen. We also provide MongoDB which is a non-relational database designed specifically for scaling (somewhat like SimpleDB). Also, 10gen is open source and currently in an alpha stage. I would like to invite you and your readers who are interested to download our SDK (which contains MongoDB and our AppServer) and try us out! We’re already supporting development in Ruby, Python, and JavaScript!
When you do, please give us feedback at http://groups.google.com/group/10gen
–Shane
http://www.10gen.com/