There are a lot of opinions on what the cloud is and naturally I have my own as well, but thought this might be a good discussion topic for here [thanks, dugan ]

I believe some people think the cloud is a place to store stuff, like your music, pictures, etc. and not much more than a big storage server. Others think it's a place to run a bunch of virtual machines that functionally are really no different than a physical box. And it's all just really marketing of existing technologies.

I say to both these cases, those are certainly examples of what you can do in a cloud, but if that's all you think a cloud is you've missed a lot.

For example, you CAN take many applications and put them on a virtual machine in the cloud and make them run, but if you want to take advantage of some additional cloud services, like shared remote storage, you need to use a whole different set of APIs to talk to it. In other words this is NOT just a bunch of disks.

Using OpenStack Swift as an example, you don't access bits and pieces of files, but rather objects. You GET and PUT them in one go. And when you do a PUT, it actually gets written out to multiple copies for reliability.

And Swift is only one cloud technology, there are many others and the list continues to grow.

There's so much more I could say but would rather hear what others may care to toss in.

-mark

The cloud is, no matter how you put it.. just a big (a lot of the times insecure) file server... :P

All things that are now labeled by "Cloud" could have been done before so, yes, it's really just a market strategy.. Or, if you prefer it, it's a concept..

Sure, I admit that there are cloud based tools that have been developed recently which are more than nice, but you can't tell me that, because a FTP server can also be accessed by an API (regardless of how that API is written) it's now a great new technology..

i remember when i was an intern, thin-client was the big buzz-word. i had a cheap pc (low amount of ram/cpu/hd (even for back then)) connected to a kvm (keyboard, video monitor, mouse) and all of the programs ran from a large server in the basement.

sorry smokey, but I have to disagree. here's a simple example [I hope] comparing ftp to cloud object storage...

let's say you have a commercial application that uses ftp to talk to a remote server. the first question you have to ask is whether or not your ftp server provides failover. if it does, is it to a shared disk? if not, how do you keep the data synchronized? ok, so lets say you DO have pairs of ftps servers sharing a disk and if one fails the other takes over. what happens if there is a power failure and both servers go down? now you have to write your application to be smart enough to deal with that or give the users a 'service not available' error! what if the disk crashes? let's say it's raid protected but a second failure occurred before the first failed disk could be replaced or brought online? you just lost your transaction and who knows how much money for your company. also, how much transactional data was written to that ftp server before it failed and after it was backed up so that data is lost too, so now you've lost more money for your company.

sure, you can write software that's smart enough to deal with all these cases but you have to admit it's a lot of work and now you've just locked yourself into at least some set of technologies, like ftp, failover, backup and who knows what else.

my point about cloud storage is it's a whole lot more than a bunch of disks. it's a highly available, distributed storage system. at least in the case of openstack, there are typically 3 or more copies of your data in potentially multiple data centers. if a complete data center goes away you're data is still available. if you're using a virtual machine that's part of the cloud and supports failover, even your application will continue running somewhere else. sure, you DO have to write your applications to take advantage of the new APIs, but now you don't have to deal with all the ugly error handling and recovery that can consume so much developer time.

as for vendor lockin - no worries, at least in the case of openstack, you can run it yourself, buy cycles from a cloud service provider or do both. if you change your mind about your vendor, no worries - multiple vendors support openstack.

at the last couple of openstack summits I heard from some 'small' companies who have moved their applications to the cloud. BestBuy now runs their website on openstack. I saw a presentation by Comcast who said they've moving to openstack to ultimately move functionality out of the set-top-boxes and into the cloud. There were a couple of Chinese companies with user bases of over 20 million running their companies on openstack. This is VERY real, NEW technology and if you don't believe me and think it's just a rebranding of existing stuff, perhaps you also thought the same thing when you first saw the web. after all the internet has been around since the time of ARPA dating back to the 60s and so maybe that world-wide-web was just a rebranding of that?

-mark

Its more than just a file storage. Its basically a black box. If you open the hood of your car there is a box with wires connecting to the engine and to the dash. You don't know whats in that box or how it works ,it just does what you want. Many people the computer is a black box, they turn it on on and it does what they want but they don't understand cpu and gpu and ram, etc.
The term black box came from the engineering world, you give it some sort of input and get an output. The cloud is similar, you put in your data be it files, calendar, contacts, etc and the cloud stores it, processes it, gives it back when you ask, etc. You don't care how it works or whats inside.

My opinion: The cloud, aka Software as a Service, aka Infrastructure as a Service, aka "Hey, we have a massive server here, let's make it accessible from other machines (read: big mainframe)"

Buzzword for the same thing that happens like the 50s and 60s in almost the same form:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage

2 members found this post helpful.

I think of "The Cloud" as more of a metaphor. A cloud is a huge thing, made up of billions of droplets of water,. but it still looks like 'one thing.'

It is A cloud.

Only when you get into the cloud and observe it closely do you realize that the 'single cloud' you were looking at is actually made up of many many different little parts.

Also, yeah. A mainframe.

@markseger:
What you are describing are services provided by others so that you don't have to worry about all that complicated behind the scene stuff.. What does security, redundancy and backups have to do with cloud services? The same hardware can run just a FTP server (and probably does).. I'm not saying that, for example, OpenStack is good or bad.. I'm just saying that they created an API based on their services and called it "cloud".. That's nothing truly new.. Like I said (and really, Tobi's links are very good here).. Cloud is at most a concept.. And it's both a good one and a bad one, in my opinion..

I think I see the possible confusion. For users, the cloud IS a black box. It just works.

Where I'm coming from is a developer perspective. As part of my day job I'm one of the people who does performance work at HP for the Openstack Swift object storage (in case you couldn't guess). From a developer perspective you absolutely need to know whats under the hood otherwise when it comes time to change the oil or tune the engine you won't know where to begin.

Perhaps a better title for this thread might have included 'developers' in it. And for developers things like APIs are critical as this IS a whole new paradigm. Do people understand that to move an application to the cloud and take advantage of the advanced services a cloud offers will take some extra thought/coding?

-mark

just a advertising "catch phrase" for a modern and up to date version of the old
Terminal and remote server from the 60's and 70's and into the 80's

by the mid 80's every computer was " reinventing the wheel" with the ALMIGHTY " PC "

your harddrive is not "local"
your software is not "local"
the CPU the software is ran on is not "local"

this is a heck a lot like
feeding punch cards into a "dumb terminal" from the 70's in a time share

just a "modern version"

Just a phoney buzz word.

1 members found this post helpful.

There are some concepts in cloud computing that have meaning. Take the changes over time in AV software as an example:

1) Originally, you could add a filter on your email to look for the I LUV U virus and block it if seen. It would obviously take all your time to keep updating this filter so:

2) You buy a program, install it on your PC, it downloads a huge signature file and goes to work. But it doesn't catch everything because it only downloads once a week so:

3) You subscribe to a cloud service where you have a very small program on your PC or phone which checks every download and is updated in realtime.

The characteristics of the cloud service are:

• No offline use
• Externally managed
• Continuous updates
• Small local footprint
• You have no idea what data is being collected and how it is used

The cloud is an effort / trend towards centralization of data and applications, much like mainframes back in the day.

Large corporate / govm't data-centers have sprung up to host everything for you, basically turning the device on your end into a controlled access terminal, and keeping your data safe in their hands.

The centralization effort / trend can be seen in numerous other real-life circumstances.

wow, I have to say people are really drinking in the marketing blitz by companies trying to change the definition. Cloud is definitely NOT centralized computing and if anything it's more distributed than many small companies can even afford.

As I said earlier, for the users it really doesn't matter. But for those considering moving their computing off their own machines and into the cloud it's a HUGH deal, with a lot of benefits but also with a lot of work. Does anyone here actually write code? I was hoping to generate some discussion on what people's experiences in working with the cloud have been and which distros you use, whether it be amazon, azure, google or openstack. Those are the main ones that come to my mind.

-mark

Actually the cloud term has been around for a long time. Its an old telco term. Any network diagram has it, you show a telephone on one side a cloud in the middle and a telephone on the other. Its just used to show (usually) someone elses services such as a phone/cable/internet network.