Cloud computing should be the most talked about buzzword today. Hardly a day passes when one is not confronted with one or other newly brewed material on the subject. No surprise that it is discussed around many drawing boards today as the next big thing hitting us after the WEB.

There are many cautious souls who have seen the hysterical drive around the internet & WEB technologies during the dot com days and the bubble that followed leaving many scattered. While a decade down the line there is a clear unison that the WEB is here to stay and is becoming ever more embedded into our lives. The bandwidth, security, browser capability etc. required its own time to attain the level of maturity to deliver services at the level acceptable to make web as popular a platform as foreseen during the days of the dot com bubble.

Similarly the success and the broad acceptance of Cloud Computing is going to be based on a few enabling technologies. What is interesting to note is the level of maturity attained by many of these technologies at the time of this writing.

Therefore we try to analyze these technologies from the technology viewpoint and understand the crucial role played by some of the technology advancement making Cloud Computing a reality.

Virtualization: Basically a technology that abstracts the various hardware subcomponents and permits multi-tenanting a system and thereby optimizing the hardware usage. An essential component for any public cloud (a factory scale capacity meant for broad consumption mostly on internet) or a private cloud (an exclusively deployed capacity typically in secured network of the owner). It is no more the elite technology reserved to mainframe systems, the choice of very matured & stable virtualization software from licensed to open source software are today plenty. The virtualization technology embedded by leading processor vendors is a further boost.