Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet.
A research paper released on October 8th, 2007 by Greg Boss, Padma Malladi, Dennis Quan, Linda Legregni, Harold Hall from IBM states: “Cloud computing is a term used to describe both a platform and type of application. A cloud computing platform dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, and deprovisions servers as needed. Servers in the cloud can be physical machines or virtual machines. Advanced clouds typically include other computing resources such as storage area networks (SANs), network equipment, firewall and other security devices.
Cloud computing also describes applications that are extended to be accessible through the Internet. These cloud applications use large data centers and powerful servers that host Web
applications and Web services. Anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard browser can access a cloud application.”
Simply said, if you don’t need to have operating system & other software application installed on your device, what you need is a device that support web browser. You can use the application through web browser. One of the good example is eyeOS. eyeOS is one of cloud OS out there. It’s an opensource project. After spent some hours playing around with it, I’ve got the feeling that i’m in love with it. Here is the website of eyeOS: http://www.eyeos.info/