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Multiple Experts Try Defining "Cloud Computing"
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 17, 2008 05:23 PM
from the chance-of-haze-leading-to-fuzziness dept.
from the chance-of-haze-leading-to-fuzziness dept.
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)"
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The Ideal, Non-Proprietary Cloud 93 comments
jg21 writes "As previously discussed on Slashdot, the new tendency to speak of 'The Cloud' or 'Cloud Computing' often seems to generate more heat than light, but one familiar industry fault line is becoming clear — those who believe clouds can be proprietary vs. those who believe they should be free. One CEO who sides with open clouds in order that companies can pick and choose from vendors depending on precisely what they need has written a detailed article in which he outlines how, in his opinion, Platform-as-a-Service should work. He identifies nine features of 'an ideal PaaS cloud' including the requirement that 'Developers should be able to interact with the cloud computer, to do business with it, without having to get on the phone with a sales person, or submit a help ticket.' [From the article: 'I think this means that cloud computing companies will, just like banks, begin more and more to "loan" each other infrastructure to handle our own peaks and valleys, But in order for this to happen we'd need the next requirement.']"
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Developers: EC2 Vs. App Engine Vs. GoGrid Vs. AppNexus 109 comments
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner delves into the ill-defined realm of 'cloud computing,' providing a deeper look at four shared services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus. Offering wildly divergent amounts of hand-holding at various layers in the stack, the services simplify your workload but force you into a set, 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine that you may not prefer. Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. He describes these 'clouds' as an evolving experiment, rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.' The sobering look at the trend includes a QuickTime tour of each service — EC2, App Engine, GoGrid, AppNexus (those links all .MOV)."
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It's as easy as defining ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually (Score:2)
According to wikipedia... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, unless we speak about software, where is mainly vapor ware.
Software 10.0 ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
be happy you missed fortran cobol assembly, and punchcards.
oh and enjoy java, and C#
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
i didn't just miss assembly. i still do.
it's a shame no one gives assembly the respect it deserves.
Re:Software 10.0 ? (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
> it's a shame no one gives assembly the respect it deserves.
That's because aside from you, me, and a dozen other people, nobody knows assembly any more. Today's generation lives in the world of the 500M web application [thedailywtf.com].
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe in the IT world but in the electronics world (at least in the UK) its still taught as micros. 6502 assembly is used quite extensively in teaching still here. Civilian industry may like Java and so on but those of us working in systems that require proven reliablity and standards conformity still need to know it.
What they mean is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Cloud computing is.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Cloud computing is a privacy destroyer. That's my definition.
Re: (Score:2)
The greatest use of Cloud Computing: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
why mod this a troll ? He's quite right actually, there have been quite a few instances of virtualization and scaleable computing facilities in the last 20 years. Think transputers, thinking machines and some even older.
The only difference between then and now is the level of ease-of-deployment. Basically anybody can do it now, whereas in the past you'd have to have a pretty serious budget.
What is Cloud Computing (Score:2, Informative)
What is Cloud Computing - Video
Summary -
"At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O'Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby the same question: "What is Cloud Computing?". Here's what we got. (more)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q [youtube.com]
Oh I know what it is! Let me let me! (Score:4, Funny)
PowerPoint version (Score:2)
* Ostensibly, the dynamic upside of this new process innovation goes beyond the ubiquitous expansion of existing consolidation synergies for cloud computing consumers.
* It also represents a radical reduction in physical footprint, power consumption and management headaches, err challenges in replacing and disposing old servers in a constant cycle.
* This eco-friendly initiative is a solid platform to establish PR campaigns.
* It further maximizes up-time through cloud redundancy, and fewer hardware upgrade cy
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You've been poking around the Dilbert Buzzword Generator, haven't you?
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi [unitedmedia.com]
Samples:
It's our responsibility to continually provide access to low-risk high-yield benefits and collaboratively administrate economically sound materials while promoting personal employee growth
It's our responsibility to authoritatively negotiate market-driven technology so that we may conveniently build low-risk high-yield opportunities to stay competitive in tomorrow's w
Good article about this (Score:2)
buzz words (Score:4, Informative)
It's interesting that a fairly large number of these guys refer to the term itself as a buzz word.
I think cloud computing is less of a buzz word than most, but I really think that most of these definitions miss the biggest difference: With cloud computing you outsource *all* your hardware. So, any application where you are not physically talking about what software runs on which piece of hardware is cloud computing to me.
Re:buzz words (Score:5, Funny)
With cloud computing you outsource *all* your hardware.
My firm practices "cloud staffing" then.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
They employ Mechanical Turk [mturk.com]?
I don't know... That's just what came to mind when I read "cloud staffing".
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe IBM was right. Maybe there will be only 5 computers in the whole world in the future...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In regular computing, you don't know what's being done.
Cloud computing is the same, except that you don't know where it's being done either.
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That's one definition of cloud computing - but another says that it doesn't always have to be outsourced hardware, e.g. it can quite easily be a bunch of stuff in your company computer halls.
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With cloud computing you outsource *all* your hardware. So, any application where you are not physically talking about what software runs on which piece of hardware is cloud computing to me.
Yeah, I think my impression was that it was sort of like what used to be called "utility computing". The idea being that someone else has taken care of the hardware and resource allocation, and maybe even the OS. If you're setting up an OS, you're doing it on a virtual machine or something, so you aren't really worried about setting things up, supporting them, what's running where, what kind of hardware it's running on, etc.
The reason you call it a "cloud" is because it's amorphous. When I feed multiple
no clouds, just smoke and mirrors (Score:3, Funny)
Limewire (Score:2)
aint it ironic?
The X.25 cloud? (Score:5, Funny)
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).
Isn't Cloud Computing... (Score:2)
...what you use to run Final Fantasy VII?
sysadmin perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
So what we've (still) got is... (Score:2, Funny)
An "infrastructural paradigm shift" that cannot be succinctly described. Or even not-succinctly described. A paradigm shift into the unknown.
Suddenly, this sounds a heckuva lot like the late 90's.
Excuse me, I've gotta go find some VC.
Cloud computing is... (Score:2)
...a term sprinkled liberally through grant proposals, business plans, etc to maximize funding and buzz. It's this year's marketing spin on "Grid Computing".
Cloud computing is so 2007. (Score:2)
Now the buzzword is pontificating computing.
Cloud computing is hosted cluster computing (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
XML still is a buzword. While there are all sorts of applications that could make use of XML for easy interoperability and such I mostly see it being used for config files and single application data stores that could be handled better in a flat format.
The other place it gets useds is as crude method of database replication by developers who should have talked to a DBA before writing their applicaion. They would have learned their was proably no need to do their own sycronization, no matter how quick and
definition of cloud computing (Score:2, Informative)
Cloud computing is a buzzword referring to an environment in which all of your enterprise's data and communications resides in another company's servers. The perceived benefit is that your enterprise does not need to have any of its own servers, and thus your IT department does not need to have any engineers.
IT managers love the concept of cloud computing, as the entire IT budget (beyond what is paid to the company that provided the cloud servers) can be used for salaries and perks for IT managers and thei
No one here get's the point (Score:4, Funny)
Cloud computing is all about visionary modular concepts creating adaptive logistical projection
using a distributed scalable core for multi-tiered background ability resulting in a inverse didactic pricing structure.
I hope I cleared that up. It's actually good to see a healthy level of skepticism on this board.
Not quite "grid"... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't remember "grid computing" being quite the on-demand system that, say, Amazon EC2 is. What makes it cool is the ability to scale it up and down on demand, rather than in months or years.
Or maybe it's some combination of grid computing with virtualization.
And yes, it's pretty much a buzzword. Just like Web 2.0 or AJAX or all the rest. It's a useful abstraction, but not a world-changing "paradigm shift".
It's (Score:2)
getting lots of data from sources outside your control.
Too easy, way too easy. (Score:3, Funny)
No, sadly this one is EASY...
Cloud computing is how computing worked in the 1960-80's - large centralized systems that did everything, and you connected to with dumb terminals. Well it's back, but this time with a different name.
Simple yes, but simple is not exciting.
Yet Some Idiot Recruiter (Score:2, Funny)
will place an ad on Dice.com requiring 5 years in depth experience in all aspects of Cloud Computing.
Nasrudin said it best (Score:4, Insightful)
Defining things has always been a problem:
The king's three scholars had accused Nazrudin of heresy, and so he was brought into the king's court for trial.
In his defense, Nazrudin asked the scholars, "Oh wise men, what is bread?"
The first scholar said, "Bread is sustenance; a food."
The second scholar said, "Bread is a combination of flour and water exposed to the heat of a fire."
The third scholar said, "Bread is a gift from God."
Nazrudin spoke to the king, "Your Majesty, how can you trust these men? Is it not strange they cannot agree on the nature of something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?"
(From The Trial of Nasrudin [wikibooks.org]
Progress? (Score:3, Funny)
Leslie Lamport famously defined a distributed system as "one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".
http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/distributed-system.txt [microsoft.com]
In this vein, I would define cloud computing as "a computing system in which the failure of a network you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
At least the name does not pretend to be clear.
My pet definition is resources that can be allocated to different departments, divisions, and users as needed rather than the "box-per-department" model that is common now. In other words, as-needed allocation.
Re:nebulous (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ça m'a fait penser à ça aussi :)
Re: (Score:2)
A participle may be used in place of an infinitive. The OP is sound.