On the Ibuildings techPortal today Vito Chin has posted a new
article dealing with PHP and "the Cloud" - where the popular web
language fits into the move towards cloud computing. Cloud
computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources
and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it
hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with
significant improvements to the distribution philosophies
underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based
development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various
parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.
Included is an illustration of how an application would interact
with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service
that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal
services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that
lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other
operating systems.