Cloud computing - What's different/unique about this bull?

irlforum

Hi,
I sound like I've only heard about cloud computing for the first time ever today but I've been out of the loop due to personal health issues.

Anyway, I've just been researching the top IT people in the world this morning and when I came across Steve Garnett from salesforce.com and how he has influenced everybody to stand up and listen to what cloud computing is all about.

Needless to say I decided to find it all out myself with wikipedia with a hell of a lot of trouble and almost giving up in fact. The problem was in simply getting a precise technical definition of what it actually is.

Wikipedia first offered me this
"A technical definition is "a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."[6] This definition states that clouds have five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service."

Now I am still struggling to see how this is a technical definition - certain does not tell an IT person anything. Is this a technical business defintion if there is a such thing?

Onwards and beginning to give up I find the narrow definiton after brawling through the above a few times.

"Narrowly speaking, cloud computing is client-server computing that abstract the details of the server away – one requests a service (resource), not a specific server (machine). However, cloud computing may be conflated with other terms, including client-server and utility computing, and the term has been criticized as vague and referring to "everything that we currently do"."

Aaaah so this is what it is then. Simple client server technology even though above does not agree. How does this differ to what was being used before though? Client requests website, ip address found, connect to access gateway/router whatever....goes through a load balancer and selects a machine to to the job for you. Machine access's SAN for data and sends it back. Abit more complicated than simple client/server I suppose yes but this is years old.... extreme scalable (or elasticky - I can understand how this word describes scalable in a sense but what's wrong with scalable), add new machine - configure into load balancer, add new hard disks to SAN with plug and play.


So I'm still confused - what's cloud computing then? Is it just a marketing term for new resources now becoming available on the internet like file backup etc.




EDIT: Actually I think I know what it is now. It's simply a way of using old techology procedures and architectures to save companies money now that bandwidth is cheaper. Similar to virtual machine technology in a way I suppose you'd say.

Onikage

irlforum wrote: »

So I'm still confused - what's cloud computing then? Is it just a marketing term for new resources now becoming available on the internet like file backup etc.

IMHO it is 90% marketing and 10% loose technical definitions that people don't agree on. Salesforce.com for example, would fail the cloud computing test when going by the wikipedia definition.

hobochris

My understanding of it would be that all resources are in a central location (i.e. server side) and any model or view work in systems with MVC or MVP patterns, is mostly done server side eliminating the need for excess resources client side.

Komplett: Marc

hobochris wrote: »

My understanding of it would be that all resources are in a central location (i.e. server side) and any model or view work in systems with MVC or MVP patterns, is mostly done server side eliminating the need for excess resources client side.

This is what I'd have said. I'd say about 90% of what anyone hears about "the cloud" is just nebulous chatter. I think the best summary I've heard about was,

"Cloud computing is like sex in secondary school; everyone's talking about it, and nobody's doing it... and if they are, they're probably not doing it well."

bullpost

I think the best way to understand it is to look at a current successful implementation. We use amazons ec2 here and its pretty impressive.
Low cost, dynamic resources available in a number of different implementations.

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

irlforum

hobochris wrote: »

My understanding of it would be that all resources are in a central location (i.e. server side) and any model or view work in systems with MVC or MVP patterns, is mostly done server side eliminating the need for excess resources client side.

I actually edited in another line to my post above after figuring it out just before you posted this but it's exactly what you are saying.

The only problem I can see with this though is that the internet is best effort and often times alot more sluggish that most people would like. Must raise serious performance concerns.

Great for saving money though and power availability. ie. great for the big buoys at the top. What about users? I can just envision "waiting on ***.amazon.ec2.co.uk" on firefox/ie/chrome. Yeah it will fly through and crunch your data but as I said - the internet - it's abit too "best effort" to send important data back and forth especially when your in a rush.

Is it not abit early for this technology unless you have leased lines into big backbones or something? Is there anyone out there researching or working on improving these internet problems?

Komplett: Marc

It's interesting that Amazon and speed have both come up so close together. I believe Amazon's cloud-based backup arrangement still offers users the option of just throwing a hard drive in a jiffy bag and posting it to them for backup... never underestimate the bandwidth of An Post

hobochris

It seems to be a "build it and they will come" situation at the moment.

Network infrastructure needs to be modernized to capitalize on this design concept, we are half way towards realizing this concept cheaper bandwidth but we need higher bandwidth availability across the board.

irlforum

Komplett (Marc) wrote: »

It's interesting that Amazon and speed have both come up so close together. I believe Amazon's cloud-based backup arrangement still offers users the option of just throwing a hard drive in a jiffy bag and posting it to them for backup... never underestimate the bandwidth of An Post

I heard amazon is very simple stuff aswell a long time ago - no business critcal apps solutions there.

Cuddlesworth

I wouldn't worry about it. Its pretty much consolidation of smaller server resources into larger scale data center's to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.

It can work for smaller operations as you don't need a large pipe anywhere except the data centre.

hare05

As far as I know, cloud computing goes something like this:

Rather than do all the important stuff on the end user computer / client, cloud computing moves all this server side. The data to be processed is sent to the server, the processing is done there, the results are sent back and simply displayed by the client.

This works well in two situations:

Where the network speed is fast enough and the server is more powerful than the client, the client will experience a significant boost in the speed at which heavy stuff is processed. Think video encoding on your netbook vs sending the file to a quadcore server, encoding it there and sending the end result back.

Where the software requires continuous updates and clients are numerous. As long as the client software is written well, it need not be updated at all. The only thing requiring an update would be the server.

DublinWriter

Komplett (Marc) wrote: »

This is what I'd have said. I'd say about 90% of what anyone hears about "the cloud" is just nebulous chatter. I think the best summary I've heard about was,

"Cloud computing is like sex in secondary school; everyone's talking about it, and nobody's doing it... and if they are, they're probably not doing it well."

As Tom Peters once said, the software business has more in common with the fashion industry than the technology industry.

Lots of Irish and UK I.T. companies lost their shirts on the touted rise of application-hosting (basically what salesforce.com are) post dot-com, before that I.T. fashions that came and went were things like object-orientated databases, ERP, CRM, Software Quality Management etc.

scribs

This is Salesforce.com's cloud computing model explained in a 3 min video

Enjoy