When you hear the term URL, what do you think of? Probably a web address - e.g., a publicly accessible HTML page such as http://google.com/ or http://news.ycombinator.com/. But URLs have a much wider application.

A PaaS Platform as a Service environment is a bit like a swan on a pond – graceful and elegant above the water, and paddling its little legs off below the water. The aforementioned abstraction provides the elegant user experience “above the water,” while high levels of automation provide the “paddling” beneath the surface.

Phil Wainewright gives us Cloud delusions at the turn of the decade. Such as:

One of the things I love about cloud computing is being able to quickly spin up instances for testing and experimentation. Lately I’ve started to become annoyed at the six or seven manual steps necessary to launch and connect to an instance on EC2 using the standard ec2-* command line tools. So I created a small tool to fire up a one-off instance, which I’m calling Sumo.

So essentially RoR is a programming language that is only now coming of age. And what struck me at Railsconf was that as a community they are taking cloud computing as a given. This is how you deploy apps. Period.

[…] The Ruby community is essentially skipping traditionally on-premise installed software. The dominant model for RoR application deployment is cloud, with platforms such as Slicehost (now part of Rackspace Cloud), Engine Yard and Heroku. Cloud services such as New Relic, FiveRuns and Scout provide the de facto standard monitoring and management frameworks, and cloud-based GitHub is the standard code version and developer collaboration tool for the RoR generation.

Moreover, training courses and educational books, such as Oreilly’s Learning Rails , use cloud platform Heroku as their standard learning environment. Meaning that a new generation of developers, for whom Ruby is their first or early programming language, are growing up with cloud platforms as a natural part of life, just as my kids are growing up with Google Docs, Wikipedia and smartphones as a natural part of life. Imagine that.

The following are what I believe to be the three most important areas of radical (vs. evolutionary) innovation in web application server components over the coming 6 - 18 months:

Damien Katz says:

"The real future of cloud computing about being a simple, low cost, high availability way to get your data and applications online, saving you the cost and hassle of building and maintaining your own infrastructure. You aren't just saving yourself from building a cluster, but from installing applications, applying patches, monitoring security, keeping backups, etc. Your cloud provider maintains the applications while making sure your data is safe, secure and accessible. They worry about the infrastructure so you don't have to."

Personal cloud computing - running multiple virtualized machines (Xen, OpenVZ, VMWare, etc) on your desktop or a single personal server - may be an emerging pattern. Vidar Hokstad writes about his setup, in which he partitions scratchpad machines (for play and experimentation) from long-term machines (for backups and archives).

Mark Mayo describes how the profession of sysadmin is changing:

Cloud computing is on everyone’s minds, because it offers the promise of infinite horizontal scalability. But to achieve this, we have to change how we build applications.

Most agree that cloud computing is the Next Big Thing, but beyond that things get murky. Being such a new space means that there’s not yet a consensus on what all the pieces are, and how they fit together.