Foreword Forget the buzzword-compliant prognostications of the IT pundits and forget the fevered predictions of open vs. proprietary, because everything is changing and changing fast. Maybe everything is changing so fast that some folks still see cloud computing as a discussion about the future, when in fact it is real, with many popular applications currently running in cloud environments. Cloud computing is just a term for what has been slowly brewing on the back burner for many years. It is the natural evolution of technology. The evolution timeline goes something like this. In the...