We have talked about cloud computing on more than one occasion last year. It has since developed into a buzz word today and lot of big companies are talking about and deploying it in their enterprises. The main benefit of Cloud Computing that we have focused on till now is that it gives a more customizable and granular control over the hardware when we go for a hosted application approach. We have also talked about some ofthe pioneers who have deployed Cloud Computing for providing
such on-demand hosted services to their customers. The more well known ones are Amazon's EC2 and Google's AppEngine. Probably Amazon was the first one to re¬lease their Cloud offerings to the public and hence has become quite popular in this domain.

If you have read our old issues, all of this would not be news for you. This time we talk about something completely different. We thought, if Cloud is such a great technology and gives such a great granular and detailed control over the Datacenter resources, then why enterprises don't deploy their own cloud setups and reap those benefits instead of going and buying them from some third party service provider? And while doing our first level of research we figured out that, yes, it is actually very much possible to deploy your own cloud in a data center and by just using commodity hardware and open source middleware. The benefit you get out of such an approach is immense. We shall also talk about some of those benefits in this article. But before we go into details, let's refresh ourselves with what Cloud computing is all about.