Cloud Computing in android

Cloud Computing in Android:
The open source Android operating system has allowed for sophisticated Cloud Computing applications to run wherever you are. Designed to be highly efficient on battery-powered devices like the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, at heart, Android is Linux. Learn more about the several layers to the Android programming model that permit the creation of secure applications that are tailor-made for Cloud Computing.Clouds, of course, consist of a huge multitude of particles of water vapor numbering in the hundreds of millions. Clouds have no central control and basically go where the wind blows. From this perspective, the Internet's multitude of client and server computers coupled with the many different purposes and controlling entities that drive the progress of it resemble clouds. Couple this with the wireless-data revolution that the cell-phone companies have brought us, and it does indeed seem like we're all awash in an invisible "cloud" of computing power.Since the dawn of electronic computers, there has been a clear division of labor between the four main functional parts of a computer:

Input/output (I/O) devices that provide the human-computer interface

Central processing unit

Volatile random access memory (RAM)

Nonvolatile memory

The first three parts put the "computing" in computers. It is in the fourth part, where the valuable data assets are typically stored, that has changed most radically with the advent of cloud computing. Valuable data assets reside in nonvolatile memory so they are protected against the loss of electrical power — regardless of whether the loss is deliberate. Typically, nonvolatile memory devices are hard disks, but they can also be solid-state devices like secure digital (SD) cards and even magnetic tape devices (all but obsolete now). But such storage devices have their limitations.Time marches on, technology has progressed, and along came computer networks, on which an organization's valuable data assets can be centralized in a computer shared by multiple terminals and backed up regularly as a necessary base IT function. This model (known as the mainframe model) offered many advantages — one being that it lightened the load each terminal location had. Small offices with little more than a tiny terminal (keyboard, mouse, display, and PC) could access gigabytes of company data and the processing power of large mainframes without cluttering up the place — so long as they were tethered by wires.The next big paradigm shift came along with the network of networks we affectionately know of as the Internet, where absolutely gargantuan computer systems (local networks) can service huge populations of tiny terminals anywhere in the world a satellite dish can be raised. 
The wireless remote nature of this configuration came to be known of as the cloud.Then along come personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and smart phones, where the miniaturization of computers has progressed to the handheld form factor we know and love so well. Suddenly, smart terminals are in the hands of countless millions of productive people, producing and consuming information at prodigious rates.In the mid- to late 1990s, e-mail and the World Wide Web were the most popular applications to dominate the cloud. Most people interacted with the cloud using a Web browser and understood the Internet to be a relatively simple application. With the advent of commercial successes like Yahoo! and Google, terabyte servers and network connections have replaced local hard disks as the preferred nonvolatile storage devices. Just as many forward-thinking visionaries predicted, the cloud has become a modern utility like water, phones, and electricity. Using the mobile-telephone digital network as a primary Internet Service Provider (ISP), the cloud grew to use millions of tiny handheld devices as the main tool for displaying the data residing on those servers.Companies no longer need to maintain large and costly server "farms" round the clock when there is another less-expensive alternative: contracting out those services through vendors like Google, Amazon, and IBM®. Through virtualization, applications that formerly ran in custom environments can be duplicated, or "imaged," to run in the cloud on the vendor servers. And with the proper metering of those services, the company will not need to pay peak prices for those times when its services are being minimally used. As hardware technology marched on, so did software, and we have seen the creation of new applications. For example, location-based services that map out businesses close to where the cell tower or built-in global positioning system (GPS) determined you are. New markets cropped up for downloading and testing useful programs and data files, such as the Android Market and the Amazon MP3 Market for purchasing and downloading music. No doubt, we'll see further advances in these unique new applications of cloud computing — for example, companies could sort out and select regional contact information, then automatically transfer today's list of cold calls to the regional salesperson's Android-based mobile phone while he sleeps.Cloud computing, where portable devices complement powerful servers, requires an operating system that maximizes what the server architects and programmers can do on a small client machine. Android is such an operating system.