The titular question is ill-posed, but understandable. [[Explain much more.]] [DKF] has made many pertinent observations based on his own cloud work: * "... it's really about rethinking applications for the internet and not just applications, but also business processes" * "... t's difficult to get right but the big drivers are the fact that it's becoming untenable to build machine rooms for everyone; that's just horribly inefficient" * "... the location of things matters, but it did before anyway even if people didn't know it" * "grid computing is focussed very much on scientific computing with an HPC flavor; cloud computing is more about renting out services" * "cloud computing is primarily not a technical change, but rather a business change, which is why most techies find it awkward ... the heart of cloud computing is not about tech" * "it's a way of sticking virtual machines and services together" * "the important thing about the cloud is that it doesn't try to make the distributedness invisible" * "'porting to the cloud' means adapting the app so that the fact that some or all of it runs remotely is not a problem" * "... think in terms of 'virtual machines for hire'" Similarly, [Steve Landers] mentions that, "if we engineered an in-house solution to cope with the peaks we'd have a lot of kit sitting around unused most of the time." [DKF]: Also note that there is no "compiler for the cloud"; it's about how to put pieces of applications on servers on the internet, with added virtualization and fine-grained accounting; you use standard compilers. [Fabricio Rocha] - '''12 Mar 2010''' - I have been thinking about this subject these days. My knowledge about cloud computing is minimal, and so I think of it as something that can be done in multiple ways. What exactly ''is'' cloud computing? At first, it looks like having very lightweight applications in a desktop, netbook or mobile device (a basic OS and a browser) able to connect to application servers which do the heavy computing. So it looks like Tcl/Tk is very adequate to the task at a server side, thanks to its channels, http support, etc. At the client side I see a problem with the apparent abandon of the Tcl plugin. Or maybe we need something new, based in [HTML 5]... <>Discussion|Internet