Operating Systems on the Internet

Operating Systems on the Internet
Aundrea Mauldin
University of Phoenix
POS 355
Ashok Rao

With the huge migration of business to the internet, it leads one to wonder about the inner workings of the internet and how it can execute so many processes and applications at one time for just one individual or multitudes of people. For purposes of this discussion we will focus on internet operating systems and the key components that make up an effective, productive, as well as efficient OS for the internet. Hopefully, at the end the reader will be enlightened on the subject of the internet and the various operating systems out there that accompany it.
When most people think of an operating system they think of Windows, Linux, or Mac OS on a desktop personal computer. However, in 1999 web and internet operating systems took off along with the internet itself. An internet OS is described as a hodgepodge of network services including but not limited to web services, peer-to-peer file-sharing, blogs and more for internet scale distributed computing. Some components that allow for an effective internet operating system is its framework or platform for defining and deploying services, universal mechanisms to overcome data friction, and standard ways for services to communicate through intermediaries that support authentication, authorization and group membership. When it comes to internet OS’s you will hear names such as Linux, Unix, SPARC, and Microsoft; these are the brands at forefront of the internet OS trend.
At the heart of the internet lies the catalyst that runs the entire process and that is the application server. Its software has to be rich, robust and highly portable and reside above the OS. An example of such software would be Microsoft’s .NET initiative. Other cornerstone technologies associated with an application server would be Java and XLM. With these tools developers have the sky as the limit to write applications that help cut cost such...