Cloud Computing
One thing that’s come up in a lot of conversations with clients shopping for a hosting solution is the idea of cloud computing. A lot of people are interested in it and they wonder if that is not the solution they are looking for instead of a dedicated server.
As evidence to the confusion articles on the Internet that explain cloud computing make any number of poor comparisons.
For example, is the following statement correct about cloud computing?
“In a cloud computing system, there’s a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications.”
Yes it could be true but that is also true of good old-fashioned client/server computing. In fact the vast majority of all definitions seem to fit both equally well. The current buzz word “cloud computing” may be the rage but it is fuzzier than ever and seems more about marketing differences than network design.
Since when has one cared before “cloud computing” about where the data that you store is or the application that you run? Most users don’t even care or know if they are hosting on a Linux or Windows server just as long as it works.
Cloud computing is built around the idea of almost limitless resource. In the past if you were a virtual customer sharing a machine and your website became so large, popular or otherwise a very heavy user of resources the hosting company would direct you to use a dedicated machine. So scaling up would be a “cloud” advantage. On the other hand, it is a very minor advantage as that happens on only rare occasions. Also, with the use of modern control panel software it is often just a few button clicks to transfer a website and all the associated services to not just another and larger machine on a data center but to any server on any appropriate network anywhere in the world.
Our own concerns at SecureWebs are predicated in the downside of cloud computing – the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. The type of outages or data loss that we hear about once in awhile now days are because of cloud computing and are of a huge scale. In other words, if you have lots of servers running off one network area storage unit and you loose that unit you could bring down dozens or even hundreds of servers. So do you build lots of stand-alone servers of different sizes for difference needs and practice the art of replacing each one should any software or hardware failure occur or do you build a very large array of servers to do the same thing?
You know you’re old when something that was once a revolution is no longer trendy. Most of us were a part of the PC revolution where each worker has their own private processing power (workstation) and we make decisions on our preferred applications. Given more time it might occur to all these cloud computer article authors that the metaphor for the cloud is very similar to main frame computing from yesteryear where computing time was controlled by the IT staff and you had limited flexibility in changing anything in the computing environment. Not a perfect analogy but cloud computing does remind one of the “bad old days.” Live long enough and everything comes full-circle again.
