During the LinuxFestJo event last Saturday, I had a chat with Noha Salem, an Egyptian Googler, about Google's upcoming agenda and future plans for the IT industry. Everything she said was pretty interesting, until she reached the issue of cloud computing.

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold.

I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds.

When Mark Shuttleworth announced the future Ubuntu 9.10 release, Karmic Koala, the goals he outlined for the server version were all to do with cloud computing but you might be asking "What is cloud computing ?" I answer this question and investigate what it can do for Ubuntu?

Web developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications. But that view is a misconception; open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being tweaked.

Cloud computing is a concept. It is an architectural framework by which one or many organizations can deploy, manage and retract any workload, public or private. Cloud computing addresses business needs from a workload perspective.

These days, everybody is talking about cloud computing, and many people use it in one form or the other. But popular cloud computing services are provided by a third party, which means that you store you data on a server somewhere, so that you can access it any time, from anywhere. But there are cloud applications that any person can use to host their own private cloud, from their home.

Recently, Richard Stallman called cloud computing 'worse than stupidity' His argument for this view is that, by giving your data away to the host of the web application you are using, you are essentially giving up all rights to that data. After all, they own it and there is little you can do to stop them from doing whatever they want with that data.

With all the talk about Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing, one of the missing aspects is the hardware that enables this. Yes the hardware becomes less and less important, but you still have to have something there. Netbooks are certainly part of the hardware that will enable true cloud computing, but devices like TechCrunch's CrunchPad will most likely, in the long run, be a bigger part.