Survey Reveals a Majority Believe "the Cloud" Is Affected by Weather

SmartAboutThings writes "In a recent survey performed by Wakefield Research, it has been discovered that the majority of the surveyed Americans are quite confused about the notion of Cloud, when it relates to Cloud Storage/Computing. The most interesting fact is that 51% of the surveyed persons thought that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing!"

Comments

It does

[Anonymous Coward]

When that stormy weather takes out power supplies to the data centres.

It isn't?

[Daetrin]

Didn't we have a story in the last couple weeks about Amazon's cloud servers getting taken out by a large storm and the resulting power outage or something like that?

Re:It isn't?

[Daetrin]

Okay, found the link: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/06/30/162250/more-uptime-problems-for-amazon-cloud

"An Amazon Web Services data center in northern Virginia lost power Friday night during an electrical storm, causing downtime for numerous customers â" including Netflix"

So the east coast has a big storm, power goes out, and the cloud goes down, and somehow people are drawing the conclusion that stormy weather can have an adverse effect on the cloud? It's possible they're confused about how big a storm is required, the article doesn't address that point, but clearly the idea isn't crazy.

Re:It isn't?

[Eponymous Hero]

they don't eat little kids.

Re:It isn't?

[The Grim Reefer]

Don't trust the clowd clowns with your data!

I certainly won't. Thanks for the tip. One other thing, how do I distinguish clowd clowns from regular clowns?

Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?

Re:It isn't?

[ArsenneLupin]

Paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65.5 Ma ago

Methinks somebody didn't understand (nor look up) what the word clade means.

Basically, a clade is a group consisting of a species (extinct or extant) and all its descendants.

So the sentence "Paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65.5 Ma ago." is just a fancy way of saying that birds are the only living things to have descended from dinosaurs (as opposed to also reptiles). Indeed, the reptile species living today are not descendant from the dinosaurs, but are different lineage. However the birds are.

Weather does affect it

[Nightlight3]

Recent outages of AWS and other providers demonstrate that weather does affect the "Cloud" platforms.

Per the newspaper of record, it does.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/amazon-web-services-knocked-offline-by-storms/

Key European Computing Hub in Ireland Outage 2011

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a huge data center in Ireland was knocked out by a severe storm last year, causing major disruptions. Why people seem to think Cloud computing = distributed computing I have no idea. See http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/07/lightning-in-dublin-knocks-amazon-microsoft-data-centers-offline/

Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone /

[ibsteve2u]

Roger that...there are still Telco lines out there that are wick...eh, I mean paper insulated "dry" core.

Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone /

[Obfuscant]

I can only imagine how he thought the manufacturers got it.

It's what's left over after they make Soylent Green. By-product.

Re:or when rain / rain water get's in the phone /

[roc97007]

Had I mod points, I'd mod this informative just to see people's reaction.

Re:"On Somebody Else's Computer".

[starfishsystems]

A useful distinction can be made between Public Cloud and Private Cloud, and it puts the matter on firmer technical ground.

Private Cloud is when the hardware is yours. It lives inside your firewall and is subject to your security practices. Public Cloud, conversely, is not yours.

Having cleared up that detail, we can talk about what makes it a "cloud" and not just a bunch of services running who-really-cares-where. Essentially, it comes about as a consequence of virtualization. There's a qualitative difference between saying, "I need to buy a server with X capacity in order to run my application," and creating an instance of your application in a cloud. Yes, they both ultimately depend on hardware capacity, but there is a separation of concerns between the abstract resources that your app needs and how they are physically provided. You tend not to think about servers any more but about instances of things. It encourages a more modular, more fluid way of solving problems.

For example, I've been talking with one of my colleagues this week about setting up a package repository. That's a server which delivers software packages for clients to install. New packages have to be added to the repository automatically, and they have to be signed. Now, this raises the awkward question of where to maintain the private key used for signing each change to the repository. We found ourselves having to rule out all of the possible algorithmic options. The essential requirement is that the signing has to be encapsulated inside something that can peform computations. What we really need is a specially hardened server that does nothing but sign changes to the repo. But who can afford to buy a whole server just for that one narrow purpose? If the server is virtual, the resource issue goes away.

Of course, other issues remain. Just as there is an inherent security risk in having unrestricted access to a physical server, there is risk in having comparable access to a virtual server. In principle, disaster recovery in a virtualized environment ought to be more robust than in a physical one, because you can maintain a perfect digital record of everything that went into creating that environment. But even if you keep that record offsite in multiple bank vaults, if you have never tried to actually bring up and test a virtual environment with it, you may be in for a big surprise.

So I don't want to do what the marketing people do and say that cloud solutions are magically wonderful. There's a useful separation of concerns in a cloud solution that, I believe, leads to a more elegant way of approaching design problems. And there's a big difference between private and public cloud that the people selling public cloud services don't really like to talk about. As to whether a cloud solution has specific advantages for you, I think one of the most surprising results is that it comes with a change of thinking.