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Is Cloud Computing the Hotel California of Tech?
Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between. "I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Atonomo.us mailing list. For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had. The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source."
As I understand it, cloud computing can be a cloud application, like google. Or you can actually run your own servers in the cloud, to which you would have complete control of the data and could dump it at will.
Of course using Software as a Service will lock you in... even if there aren't nefarious reasons behind it. But if your going to provision several cloud server instances, load Redhat on them, and put everything in mysql... then your free to do what you will with your data.
Software as a Service Cloud Computing. If anything SAS is just a small segment of the Cloud Computing movement.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Or even just keeping a copy of your own data on your own system.
Thats why I don't call it "cloud computing", I prefer OPS (other peoples servers). Its more self-explanitory.
What you can use the cloud for is to have a few truecrypt volumes stored there as a backup in case you ever need them.
If someone gets at your volume they won't be any wiser.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Why? What could be a better phrase to describe something entirely clouded, than "cloud"? Keep the term and contrast it to "clear sky computing" where no clouds hide the sun (i.e. the data).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Uh, yeah.. maybe your data wants to be free, but my data is staying right the hell on my computer, where it belongs.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black