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Multiple Experts Try Defining "Cloud Computing"
jg21 writes "Even though IBM's Irving Wladawsky Berger reports a leading analyst as having said recently that 'There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is,' here are no fewer than twenty attempts at a definition of the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world — some of them really quite good. From the article: 'Cloud computing is...the user-friendly version of grid computing.' (Trevor Doerksen) and 'Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource.' (Kevin Hartig)"
... is mainly water vapor.
Ok, unless we speak about software, where is mainly vapor ware.
buzzword-compliant computing. I hate stories like this, which are really just cover for somebody's marketing.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Gives Wired and other mags yet another buzzword topic to claim is newfangled and great when really it's just a new paint job on an idea that has been around for decades. But no, really, it's a paradigm shift, we SWEAAAR. Bleh.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
It's obviously the latest Web 2.0 .NET technology-based user-driven blogging paradigm that gives the bloggosphere the synergy for cloud-based dynamic content platforms!
/business-mode
There are mountains to cross for those that are willing.
With cloud computing you outsource *all* your hardware.
My firm practices "cloud staffing" then.
Table-ized A.I.
Reminds me of the infrastructure diagrams of corporate LAN's and WAN's back in the 1990's. They would have a diagram of the local network of each site with servers, workstations, routers and firewalls. Then each firewall would be connected to an X.25 cloud (which looked exactly like a big puffy cloud). If it was an internal ID department diagram, then someone would usually add four or more legs and a face or some lightning flashes (then it became an X.25 spider, an X.25 sheep, or an X.25 packet storm).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Assembly? I wish we were so advanced. We have to do all our modeling in real-time. Though there's something terribly satisfying when your final calculations are complete and the giant mousetrap fall atop the little rodent...
Hrm, maybe it's just my background in systems administration, but I thought cloud computing was just an inevitable combination of large scale web hosting with virtualization.
In late 1990's, businesses generally had their own internet server(s) in a colo facility.
In the early 2000's, some companies outsourced their internet infrastructure to managed service providers - other companies built their own in-house data centers to keep up with escalating application requirements.
In the mid 2000's, server sprawl started to impact practically everyone...the first 100 boxes you deploy can be somewhat interesting, but after that... you're entire admin staff (outsourced or not) ends up spending all its time dealing with faults in existing hardware rather than deploying new services...plus electricity/cooling/etc all get more expensive so everyone starts to figure out ways to avoid putting in new boxes. Poof, in comes with virtualization that's actually reliable and actually interesting when it disassociates the virtual machines from worrying about hardware at all and allows them to move from system to system w/o any need for sysadmins to press the "fail over" or "load balance" buttons.
Now, in 2007, smart marketing and product development people at amazon and elsewhere decide they can take over the web hosting industry by heavily commercializing the large virtualization clusters amazon has already deployed...and poof, wrappers to allow developers to create virtual machines and access back end San storage for the clusters are written, along with other stuff that will appeal to anyone who doesn't have a large existing infrastructure..and it's called "cloud computing". To avoid losing out, everyone else says they have their own cloud computing plans/etc...
Now, I guess this is all there and good...but I always thought that what differentiated good hosting facilities from each other was the quality of the admin staff, customer service, defined SLA's and 24/7 emergency response, comprehensive application monitoring, combined with general availability of senior system architects...all of which I don't think amazon/et al have seriously addressed. That means good managed service or web hosting companies can still succeed by either building their own large virtualization clusters and calling them clouds or rebranding and adding value on top of amazon and other cloud providers.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective -- one needs to look at it from the application's perspective, not the system's perspective. The "cloud" represents the resources needed to perform a task -- it's an abstraction used to represent resource acquisition, not resource allocation.
In practice, though, you're pretty close to the truth. Instead of having an allocated set of computers for processing a group's tasks, they can draw from the cloud, which is available to multiple groups. As your computing needs grow, you can have the Cloud take over another computer, which reduces the number of computing resources, but increases the power of the Cloud. This has the advantage of reducing single points of failure, and more efficiently allocating computing resources. Say you start with 100 Macs... as each Mac is subsumed by the MacCloud, the MacCloud grows in strength. Eventually, there can be only one.
Sorry.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Cloud computing refers to a cluster computing environment hosted by a single company. This approach is also referred to as "utility computing," and back around 1999 or so, the companies providing these services used to be called "application service providers."
The difference between cloud computing and grid computing, which was all the rage around 2000 (see the academic Globus project) is that grid computing aggregates *widely* heterogeneous computers under different authorities across Internet-scale wide-area networks. A common approach is aggregating universities' computers to form a large-scale cluster. Disadvantages include the fact that you had to program with MPI, communication latencies are high, and there were a lot of authentication issues.
Cloud computing avoids these difficult issues by having a single company host these services for you, and it's typically being done by the big players who can afford to do so (Amazon, Microsoft, Google). Cluster farms are controlled in data centres under one authority. The programmatic interface is simpler, and computation is typically through a fixed paradigm like MapReduce, although there are known SQL-like approaches to run on clusters. Communication through a GigEthernet is typical in a cluster within a data centre.
Is cloud computing a buzzword? Possibly, but then "multi-core," "data centre," and "XML" used to be buzzwords too. Within five years, doing development on a particular vendor's cloud computing infrastructure may be as viable a (specialised) skill as programming for Windows, Linux, or MacOS.