All the Shades of the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing is a powerful technology that in the last decade revolutionised computing and storage in particular for Industry and Private Sectors. Today, large investments are ongoing to build Cloud Infrastructures at National or International level (e.g. the European Open Science Cloud initiative). Also, scientists are approaching commercial and private Clouds at different scales: single researchers test the Clouds for small research projects, at the same time large international collaborations are evaluating Cloud technology to collect, process, analyse, archive and curate their data. In this paper, we discuss the use of Cloud in Astrophysics at different scales using some examples and we present future trends and possibilities that the use of Cloud computing and its convergence with high performance computing will open: from high-end data analysis to high performance data analytics, from scientific computing to data analytics.