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."

letter to the cloud

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

Re:letter to the cloud

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

Amen. Imagine something like BitTorrent but instead of receiving and transmitting data among many other clients, you instead receive and transmit slices of computing power AND data among many other clients. I would perhaps call that "cloud computing" in the same way that you could call BitTorrent "swarm downloading". I would liken it to the distributed SETI processing or the distributed efforts to crack various encryption schemes, except more general-purpose.

So instead of a single monolithic machine centrally running everyone's programs, something more like a Beowulf cluster centrally runs everyone's programs. As others have pointed out, this really seems to be just another iteration of the mainframe model. I share parent's wariness of anything that is so thoroughly buzzword-laden.

Re:

Fair enough analogy. What you're proposing is more or less what Grid computing intends to offer. There are claims that cloud computing is a superset but without a specific implementation we have to guess what distinguishes those claims from pure hype. But let's be charitable. Taking Grid as a lower bound, there are two things which differ from a torrent download:

• Somebody still has to write the distributed algorithm for whatever it is that you'd like to do. And if your computation doesn't benefit from

Re:

I don't yet see it as cynically as you do, though maybe the cynicism is warranted.

Mainframe metaphor or not, this "cloud" concept makes the location of the mainframe less relevant, and that location might change without the user needing it. I think it also makes the location of the user less relevant, if they can access these resources from wherever they are.

Visionary?

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.

Re:Visionary?

If you can manage to get bitten by a radioactive spider, or otherwise exposed to unusual radiation, you're hired. Though for slashdotters, I suppose sunlight qualifies as "unusual radiation"

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"I'd like a job as a visionary"

What you describe is not a visionary, googles founders were visionary, visionary implies you are both capable and have a vision.

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BorgCopyeditor-Muad-Dib

Cloud apps...

... 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.

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(i.e. some kind of 'quantum' internet).

That sounds like some kind of 'quantum' leap...

Reaction to copyright?

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.

the cloud...

so many words, so little substance = cloudware.

Can we all agree

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.

Re:

Can we all agree that no one who has thought things through wants to "rent" software?

Sure, but people who have thought things through may want flexible provision of hardware resources. And with the cloud, you get that. Whether you are "renting software" depends on the software being used. If you are using a service running on open source software in the cloud, what you are paying for is support services and, effectively, hardware rental, not software rental.

Re:

there's a difference between software as a service and renting software. when you use the postal system you're not renting the postal network. you're simply using their service. and when you subscribe to broadband, you're not renting the ISP's broadband network. and there's nothing wrong with renting as a payment/service model. when you pay for whether shared or dedicated web hosting, it's rented disk space, hardware use, etc. just like when you rent a house, you keep vital possessions in it without worryin

So many negative posts

This stuff actually looks pretty good:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ [amazon.com]

It really is just another way of hosting right?

I think S3 seems to work well for some people also.

Re:

Read the SLA. Note the utter absence of any reference to data privacy or integrity. The committed uptime is slightly worse than what I've logged on my office system over the past ten years, taking into account kernel panics, hardware failures, and scheduled upgrades. Hardly a high availability solution, in other words.

Re:

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 thought the cloud got canceled...

...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!

Compare the presentation

On the one hand, you've cloud computing [abiquo.com] resources, which supply minimal information, some source but a LOT of buzzwords, versus distributed computing [wisc.edu] versus grid computing [globus.org], 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?

Not 'the cloud' again...

Seriously, we should rename the 'cloud computing' tag to 'horseshit'.

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Sure. "The cloud" is not just a new name for the mainframe.

It's a name for the server farm. Which is functionally rather similar, except for where it isn't.

Re:

Easy.
Mainframes are extinct dinosaurs.
The cloud is a completely new paradigm of gigantic primitive reptilian computing.

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Relying on Outlook instead of Gmail's "glitchy" interface? O please, tell me another fairy tale about Outlook's superior stability.

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O please, tell me another fairy tale about Outlook's superior stability.

When I hit the DEL key during startup, it launches Outlook.