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
