Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance.

I had the pleasure of joining a video conference with our local Drupal expert, Katherine Druckman, and Barry Jaspan, one of the system architects from Acquia. Acquia is a company that specializes in Drupal. While their company does many things for clients interested in using Drupal, we were specifically talking about cloud computing.

Cloud computing is not only the latest buzz term, it might well be the model of computing that powers the 21st century. However, it’s easy to forget that personal computing, in which each user has a standalone system that can operate without a network, is itself a relatively new approach.