Glide OS
Glide offers an option for cloud computing through Glide OS, a comprehensive operating system launched in late-2005. Glide OS and services are owned and operated by TransMedia Corporation, an online media management company.
Peppermint OS
Peppermint OS, launched on May 9, 2010, is a Linux-based operating system that runs in the cloud. It was created by Kendall Weaver, the same developer as the Linux Mint 8 LXDE Community Edition and is touted as a user-friendly, lightweight, fast and stable OS. Within its first week of release, Peppermint OS was downloaded over 25,000 times. By mid-July, scarcely two months later, Peppermint OS had 250,000 users. Re-spins of the OS continue to be released, about once a month. Re-spins include minor bug fixes and new updates pre-installed.
Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)
Amazon offers Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for scalable compute resources in the cloud. The article briefly describes the service and functionality. EC2 has different sizes of instances, which are running systems based on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Instances are grouped into six families: Standard; Micro; High-Memory; High-CPU; Cluster; and Cluster GPU instances. Finally, the article describes the features and best practices of Amazon’s Web Services.
Security in the Cloud
Cloud computing was certainly a buzz phrase for 2010, with recession-hit companies realizing that they could tap into the cloud to gain access to infrastructure resources or business applications. According to a Cisco IBSG survey, approximately 12 percent of enterprise workloads would be moved to the cloud by the end of 2013. This would not only include desktop applications, collaboration, email, enterprise resource planning, but virtually any application.
