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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."
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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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)
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
its useful when you need to scale up or scale down fast, otherwise I estimated using their calculator my monthly bills would be 5x times my current server/electricity/bandwidth/other costs combined
I might say if you also count the workers employed for the maintenance, scaling and general upkeep of your own "cluster" it would make the price on par with what Amazon is offering.
Agreed though that the better SLA may be some time coming. We will see how it plays out.