Pirate Bay Cloud Computing

Pirate Bay goes legit and now is working toward offering their file sharing bit-torrent services through the cloud.  By allocating your hardware storage in the cloud.

Eventually, Pirate Bay wants to use and resell this computing power in exchange for discounted subscription fees.  This will allow them to go after Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com was the early leader in the Software as a Service arena back in 1999. The founders felt traditional software development would eventually be replaced with web based services.

Salesforce.com’s flagship product is a web-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution. As of September 2007, they had over 900,000 subscribers and supported 100-million customer transactions in one day.

In 2007 Salesforce.com launched Force.com, a Platform-As-A-Service, as the a building block platform for additional web based software services.

Microsoft Office Live

The service is marketed for Business, School and Home use. Key features include:

• Access your documents from almost anywhere
  Save over 1,000 Microsoft Office documents in one online place
  Open and save directly from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint
  Control who sees and edits files; password-protected sharing

Cloud Computing Service: Remote structured document storage

Sign up for your free account.

Google Apps

Currently there are two versions of the Apps software. The Free Standard Edition and the $50/User Premier Edition. The main difference between the two versions is security and support.

Google Apps includes the following software:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Chat
• Google Docs – Word Processing
• Google Docs – Spreadsheets
• Google Docs – Presentations
• Google Video
• Google Sites

Each of these applications are hosted by Google and user access is maintained in a central web-based control admin.

The Services are accessible through standard interfaces such as SOAP and REST. The service allows for on demand scaling for your data needs and can be accessed securely through HTTPS/SSL.

Unstructured data such as photos and documents can be stored and retrieved from anywhere/anytime.

Live Services include:

• Admin Center
• Alerts
• Contacts
• FeedSync
• Live Framework
• Messenger
• Photo Gallery
• Photos
• Search
• Silverlight Streaming
• Spaces
• Virtual Earth
• Web Gadgets
• Windows Live ID
• Writer

Mircrosoft Azure Cloud

The Microsoft Azure .NET Services is the developer oriented component of the Windows Azure Platform. This component allows developers to create applications that sit in the Microsoft Cloud.

The Components of the .NET Services are:

• Access Control
• Service Bus
• Workflow Service

See how a simple application is created using Visual Web Developer and the Azure SDK.

The Azure Services Platform is currently made up of the following components:

• Live Services
• .NET Services
• SQL Services
• Dynamics CRM Services
• Sharepoint Services

These services are hosted by Microsoft, so there is no need for any hardware or infrastructure investment for creating high available, on-demand scaling applications on a pay as you go price model.

Below is a diagram from Microsoft showing how all the Windows Azure Services work together.

Mircrosoft Azure Cloud