Peer-to-Peer Cloud Computing

Ozalp Babaoglu Moreno Marzolla ! Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Bologna, Italy ! Cloud computing is perhaps the most disruptive technological development to have come along in information technology in some time. In little over a decade, cloud technology has revolutionized the path from idea to product launch, especially for Internet startups. In the pre-cloud era, any startup anxious to deploy its “next big thing” on the Internet had to make significant investments for physical real-estate, hardware equipment, network connectivity and technical personnel to keep it all functioning. Even if the startup could sustain the financial burden of building and maintaining a complex in-house computing infrastructure, the inevitable delays in launching its product could nullify any competitive edge it may have had. !