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I think the Cloud Computing has the consult with Server-side processing. I don't know much about cloud computing. But, recently I came across green computing & tried to know it. Please clarify the concept of Cloud Computing & also help to solve the problem if the it has any consult with Green Computing.

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    Your question is hard to read and unclear, can you rewrite it please.
    – Chopper3
    Jun 18, 2010 at 11:40

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Cloud computing is more a marketing concept than a computing concept. It abstracts your computing resources so the end user doesn't need to worry about where the service is running; just connect to XYZ address or IP and the workstation/service/etc. magically works, whether it's geographically distributed over a wide range (so it is fast for John in Los Angeles and Bill in New York rather than just fast for people located close by to a central server farm) or it can apply to in-house servers (create a farm of systems running VMWare with a configuration so your in-house web based application will spin up more virtual machines as the load increases, invisibly to the users, so they can get their work done while you're doing maintenance on some of the physical machines and they're unaware of it because you're not tying the application(s) to a specific physical server).

As for green computing, if you mean saving energy, there's an argument that cloud computing can scale upwards and downwards depending on usage, so you're not using as much power for a datacenter running full tilt when you only have half the workload. Since most "cloud computing" platforms seem to involve load balancing and virtualization, you can consolidate services on fewer physical machines (for example we have ten or eleven low-use servers virtualized on one physical server, so that's nine or ten systems not drawing electricity and generating heat, cutting cooling and power costs).

Does this answer the question? Cloud computing is little more than a buzzword for abstracting the implementation of a computing service from the user. It's magic! Except for us magicians.

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    +1 "It's magic! Except for us magicians." (I wish I could do more than just +1).
    – Chris S
    Jun 18, 2010 at 12:49
  • Cloud computing is really a business concept that puts together a bunch of technical ideas (e.g., virtualization, dynamically-reconfigurable networking) to do things that the “business” side of the business had not previously considered. There's no real technical change involved (so don't look for a technical definition) but it does make a big difference. If nothing else, it's a convenient tag to hang on outsourcing your servers to a shared colo facility when selling the idea to management! Jun 18, 2010 at 14:03
  • ...when I held aloft my magic sword and said, "By the power of SAAS!" Jun 18, 2010 at 14:25