On Oct 17, 2009, at 4:51 PM, russell standish wrote:
The whole cloud thing as presented in this article leaves me a bit cold.
Few of the articles are written by folks using cloud computing, thus its just buzzword compliant hype.
There really are some interesting cloud things happening, but I haven't seen a good article yet on it. After using Amazon, its clearly just hardware in the sky and not all that exciting. Mainly useful for moving your IT infrastructure outside of your buildings.
But GAE (Google App Engine) has serious interest. First of all, it has a much easier way to build "web apps". It does NOT give you LAMP -- but it does give you an interesting replacement which makes building web apps much simpler. And further, it integrates all the Google Desk Top apps and other services and libraries (Maps, Earth, Analytics and so on) into the GAE engine. The Google File System with Big Tables is pretty wonderful too. World wide secure transactions with a fragmented, replicated, file system.
A third interesting cloud environment is Aptana, more programmer oriented and comes with an Eclipse plugin/front end.
Unfortunately, very few articles capture the cloud scene.
I don't want software as a service, I want it as an application, running on my own computer with my own data.
Well, clearly cloud computing is not oriented toward desktop/personal computer applications. So sure, you wouldn't want cloud computing for your situation.
With open source, I can get the applications at the price I can afford, and adapt them if needed for my needs.
Agreed .. but again, the target is not you. Its folks who want to shoot their computers and servers and migrate away from the gawd awful problems of maintaining their own IT infrastructure.
Don't forget: one of the biggest problems companies is how noob their employees are. The discipline of cloud computing is compelling for companies not wanting their spreadsheets walking around in laptops that travel world wide.
If I need serious grunt, then no cloud will solve the supercomputing problem - regular high performance computing centres are still needed for that (although if the Grid is ever delivered not still-born, that is an alternative).
The best we've got so far in this area is cloud (web) render farms, very popular and inexpensive for Blender users.
I can see some point in enterprise-wide clouds though...
Yup. Actually, if I were building a small business today, I'd go cloud, via the for-pay Google system. I'd fire anyone having a company spreadsheet or document on their laptop and not in the cloud. Or company email on their computer (POP rather than IMAP). It is just too expensive and dangerous. I was chief scientist for Sun's IT department for a couple of years and the things civilians do would blow your mind!
-- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
