Cloud Computing Challenges with Emphasis on Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure

Abstract

Cloud Computing has received much attention by the IT-Business world. As compared to the common computing platforms, cloud computing is more flexible in supporting real-time computation and is considered a more powerful model for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. However, since cloud computing is still at its infancy, it faces many challenges that stand against its growth and spread. This article discusses some challenges facing cloud computing growth and conducts a comparison study between Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure in dealing with such challenges. It concludes that Amazon EC2 generally offers better solutions than Windows Azure. Nevertheless, the selection between them depends on the needs of customers.