Cloud computing has become a major force for change in how web design, configure, provision, and manage IT infrastructure. Instead of custom-provisioning individual systems or clusters, an architect oradministrator is expected to have hundreds, or even thousands of resources under their control! A variety of approaches have emerged to do this.

On one hand, services such as Amazon's SimpleDBor Google's App Engine completely abstract the infrastructure away from the developer, outsourcing it to Amazon and Google,respectively.
On the other hand, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) provides a raw interface to provisioning and managing Linux instances.

The reason for such disparity and confusion is that the Cloud is multi-disciplinary. It straddles the areas of virtualization, ITmanagement, clustering, Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and WebArchitecture, with the overall goal of providing easily accessible interfaces for using and manipulating infrastructure.

This tutorial is targeted at developers and architects that want todig into the internals of cloud computing, so they an evaluate the approach that best suits their needs. It will introduce them to:

• The emerging cloud computing industry, and how it compares to software-as-a-service, traditional IT management and provisioning
• Example cloud architectures; how they're provisioned and managed, from clustered web applications, to large databases, and Hadoop'sparallel batch processing.
• The Amazon EC2 API, a popular interface to provision and manage Linux instances;
• The Puppet infrastructure development system, an open source Ruby-based platform for managing large installations of software
• Elastra open cloud services, an open source toolkit to provisioning and deploying systems with the Elastic Computing and Deployment MarkupLanguages (EDML and ECML)
• Cloud computing security, reliability, scalability, and performance considerations.