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The Effects of the Cloud On Business, Education
g8orade points out two recent articles in The Economist about the rise of cloud computing. The first discusses how software-as-a-service has come to pervade online interactions. "Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology visionary at IBM, compares cloud computing to the Cambrian explosion some 500m years ago when the rate of evolution sped up, in part because the cell had been perfected and standardised, allowing evolution to build more complex organisms." The next article examines how the cloud will force a "trade-off between sovereignty and efficiency." Reader pjones contributes news that the Virtual Computer Lab will be supplementing more traditional computer labs at North Carolina State University, and adds, "NCSU's Virtual Computing Lab and IBM are offering the VCL code as a software 'appliance' for use in schools to link to the program. Downloads are available at ibiblio at UNC-Chapel Hill. The VCL also is partnering with Apache.org to make the software available and to allow further community participation in future development."
dear cloud,
please stop crapping up the front page of slashdot with your buzzword laden stories. I have not been this annoyed since everybody started "surfing" the "information superhighway". I hope you soon turn to "rain" and fall from the "cybersky" and die.
thank you,
umbrellaman
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
I'd like a job as a visionary. I once dreamt I would find a $20 bill on the street, and then several months later, I DID! Is that enough of a qualification? I've also had numerous hunches, premonitions, and vague senses of foreboding. I think with the passage of time that these powers will only increase, and within 5 to 10 years, I could be up to Nostradamus-level prognastication.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Somebody really needs to do a good job to convince me that "cloud" is not just a new name for the mainframe. Really.
... really have a long way to go IMHO. The user interface for many websites and webapps is horrible, and I doubt they will ever fully replace offline apps (i.e. photoshop, 3d studio max, etc, etc), until we have a quantum leap in bandwidth + latency reduction (i.e. some kind of 'quantum' internet).
I like a lot of google apps, like Google notebook, Gmail, etc, but they are nowhere near as good as a well made offline app. Too many apps lack developmental time and focus, IMHO or lack vision to how the program could be made into a better app, with better integration. So people don't need to juggle many smaller apps which is cumbersome to get tasks done.
Could be a reaction to failed attempts to control client side data. By utilizing software as a service you ensure that your programming language and database is never compromised. Naturally, software as a service is ideal for many business models. I feare that the cloud computing will result in a centralization of data one day and hope the integrity of a decentralized system is maintained.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
so many words, so little substance = cloudware.
Cloud computing may be the next big thing, but it'll be quite some time before cloud computing can give computing on the ground a real run for its money.
Last-mile broadband, for most smaller businesses and homes, is synonymous with highly asymmetric connections. Since many applications don't function on networks with strained upstream bandwidth, only enterprise-grade data service sare able to offer the robust speeds needed for cloud computing to excel.
And web-based applications still can't approach locally hosted apps in terms of reliability and performance. This is why so many Gmail users connect via IMAP using their Outlook client instead of relying on Gmail's sometimes glitchy web interface.
The comparison is crazy. Cloud computing is cool, it will help out in a lot of ways for sure, but comparing it to the cell had been perfected and standardised is way to out there. Firstly, clouds are not standardised ... in fact a lot of clouds are black boxes (remember Java?) they work, but how is kept silent. And for sure cloud computing is not perfected ... it's way to young and has way to many similarities to big iron mainframes and the clouds sometimes evaporate and fall over.
Just like any other new way to do things it ends up being another tool in the tool bag. Use it where it makes sense and don't hammer a nail with a cloud, it doesn't work.
I think the article below does a better job of explaining both what cloud computing is, and what the future applications for cloud computing are.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071116_379585.htm
that no one who has thought things through wants to "rent" software? Nor does anyone who has rationally analyzed this want to have important data locked up in some format/location where it's inaccessible when the network goes down or the "cloud provider" goes under.
Aside from the regulatory hurdles that businesses would have to overcome, there's just too much risk at the moment, no matter what the SLA says. And for consumers, where bandwidth and network outages are a real issue, there's basically no compelling reason to do this.
I'm sure all the buzzword boys down in "cloud city" are hoping that they can obfuscate these issues, but in my mind, they're real show stoppers.
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This stuff actually looks pretty good:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
It really is just another way of hosting right?
I think S3 seems to work well for some people also.
Too bad God's Intelligently designed dinosaurs (like IBM today) went extinct.
Great.
Another buzzword that idiot journalists will write pages and pages of gibberish about.
And idiot HR people will want someone having 10 years of" in depth experience" in it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
old copypasta is old
...by Depression 2.0. Either that, or the CEO of Oracle canceled it. I mean all this CDO, Derivative, dot-com crap finally blew up in a way that really matters. Don't you get i? Fads were just a fad!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
On the one hand, you've cloud computing resources, which supply minimal information, some source but a LOT of buzzwords, versus distributed computing versus grid computing, where there's a lot more information on what is (and is not) provided, and a lot more code is there. Ultimately, the best way to tell if something is worthwhile is to see if the provider thinks it's worthwhile. Cloud providers don't think it worthwhile to do for profit the work grid providers do for free, ergo cloud providers don't rate their own service highly. If they don't, why should anyone else?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Seriously, we should rename the 'cloud computing' tag to 'horseshit'.
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
I create several clouds a day, and can't wait to sell them in the new regime. //pauses
Oh man, I'm about to create a ne
"BRAAAAAp put put"
Cloud....
Maybe I should stop eating boiled eggs. //staggers away from the effluent cloud
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Am I reading this correctly that the VCL software they are incubating at Apache uses VMware ESX? Ugh! If so, that puts it in the "mostly useless" category. Why doesn't it use Xen or KVM or OpenVZ or just use libvirt?
Is that whether you want to believe it or not, cloud computing is a subscription service.
Company I work for right now shells about $250 a month for Central Desktop, plus another $12 per mailbox for 26 people. Oh and add about $14 per Blackberry for about 8 people. Adds up to $674 a month, or $8,088 a year.
I frequently make the case that a little shoebox server could run Linux with Qmail and Apache on it and we could get the whole kit and kaboodle for lots less than $8K a year.
...come to me than fetching it through browser all the time. It's nice to have redundancy through web clients if anything breaks down locally but I to me feels cloud computing more clunky and unproductive than local.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
The writer does have some radically new definitions of a few terms. Thus, calling either a biological cell or cloud computing "efficient" is totally bizarre, unless you are using the term in a way that's different from any dictionary definition. Biologists would just laugh a the idea. Then they'd probably go into either a list of all the known inefficiencies in the basic biochemistry, or they'd try to explain that the evolutionary process doesn't care much about efficiency. All that matters is relative survival. And the process itself is dependent on random mutation that are usually (but not always) detrimental to the organism.
Similarly, anyone who has looked at the low-level details of the Internet (i.e., various protocols) will tell you that it's far from efficient. Like biological systems, it has won out and thrived not because it's perfect, but it's better in several important ways than any of its competitors. The major reason, of course, is its free/open nature. Anyone can download any of the specs and implement them without permission from anyone else.
Thus, back in the 1980s, I worked on a number of OSI projects. Repeatedly, what would happen is that we'd order the docs we needed to start implementing, going through the usual purchasing red tape that every company has, fire off the purchase order, and wait. While we were waiting, we'd play around with our ideas on IP. We'd fetch the docs and have them in a few minutes. By the time we got the docs we needed, we'd already had our ideas up and running on IP. We usually had IP-based deliverable before we could even start coding for OSI. Eventually, the idea got through to even the most dimwitted managers.
I also sat through a number of explanations of why DECnet was superior to IP. Maybe it was, but as a developer, I found that (even when working on contract to DEC), I couldn't get at the low-level details of DECnet that I needed. With IP, all the information was available in minutes with no bureaucratic hassle. So it didn't matter if DECnet was technically superior; it was sufficiently hidden from developers like me that I couldn't write (semi-)reliable code for it like I could for IP.
Efficiency is useful and desirable, but it's not the first concern for either biological or electronic systems. First, you have to function well in your environment. Then you can worry about efficiency. A good designer will think about both in parallel, of course; even the idiotic evolutionary process "understands" that. But unless it works in the real-world environment, it doesn't matter how efficient it is.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The first thing about these articles is to realize that business and government are big proponents. That's why one article about balancing convenience vs. privacy is important. RMS knows this.
That's why a recent NYTimes article about the quants' influence on the financial meltdown quoted Ted Kazcinsky sp? and why an article a few years ago called Why the Future Doesn't Need Us did too.
The second thing to realize is so are consumers of Google and the iPhone.
So all of the kvetching about the use of the term "cloud" really (REALLY) misses the point. Get over it to what it means.
Centralized network terminal computing on central servers is coming and it's going to hit a tipping point that will or may already be affecting your life, depending on your type of business ERP or your own consumer habits.
You might want to look up the short story Manna at MarshallBrain for a dystopian perspective.
You may want to think.
as someone who runs a "cluster" of few dozen servers and several sites as big or bigger than slashdot, I can tell you this amazon is very very expensive
That would be because you are trying to take service that is not designed for your use case and shoehorn it into your use case. True, you could use EC2 as a web host, but that is not what it's designed for since your computing needs are static.
To get value out of the Elastic Compute Cloud, you need to have elastic computing needs. Let's say one of your super-huge websites gets a traffic spike of 3X on the first day of every month. For your data center solution, you would need to spec infrastructure to meet your peak volumes. But your peak volume happens only once per month. For the rest of the month, 2/3 of your infrastructure is idling. This is a colossal waste of resources, and EC2 could save you money.
Or how about another great use of EC2: the cold spare. I host my apartment rental business website on a cheapie webhost that is prone to experience downtime 2-3 times per year (Dreamhost). Despite Dreamhost being notoriously flaky, I can achieve respectable uptimes because whenever Dreamhost bites the dust, my website automatically fails over to EC2. With EC2, I only pay while I'm using it, but just having it there allows me to get away with using a $5/mo webhost for a business website.
For what you get, EC2 is dirt cheap. When my website goes down, I need it back up ASAP, and with EC2, I can automatically fail over in under 5 minutes, and it only costs me $0.10/hr while my cold spare is in use. An entire year's worth of respectable availability costs me less than a Starbucks coffee. Now that is value.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock