This is a subject I am just starting to understand. I talked with Dave Bost the other day at the February CAG meeting about Azure. This morning the subject came up again as I was listening to the Thirsty Developer podcast. These got me thinking about where does cloud computing fit in?
As I understand it the difference between ASP model and Azure is that an ASP is hosting their application for you to use and what Azure offers hosting your application. Now this differs again from normal hosting companies since with Azure you are purchasing application resources instead of server resources. I believe that as a term “Cloud Computing” can actually cover all of these scenarios.
Where I see this as an opportunity is for smaller companies who can’t afford a staff to manage a set of servers. I am sure that large companies will also leverage this technology, but proportionally this type of expense is a larger part of a small companies expenses. Spend your money on developing applications that allow you to run your business, not on maintaining a server farm and all that goes with it.
Of course all this is just initial thoughts based on very little information. What I do think it deserves is a closer look.