11.3. Into the Clouds

The arrival of cloud computing is by far the most conspicuous trend in recent times, and it’s likely to have the most wide-scale impact on enterprise software delivery in the coming years. Whether viewed as a natural extension of Internet-based computing or a completely new phenomenon, high-bandwidth global interconnectivity and cheap processors and storage have fueled moves to create large computing centers that can act as massive computing hubs to serve organizations that may be distributed around the globe. These centralized computing centers can be created by a single organization, shared between organizations, or be provided by third parties as a resource that can be acquired as necessary. All these give rise to the possibility that e....