Why you should pay attention to cloud computing.
July 6th, 2009 (Culture, Tech)Have you heard of cloud computing? Sure you have. Do you use Gmail? That’s cloud computing. Anytime data is stored somewhere “on the internet” or a computation is done without using your local computer…that’s cloud computing.
So, why should you care about this term that has popped up recently for describing a service that has been around in one form or another for quite a few years now? Well, it’s more than just a new word…it’s a way of thinking about how we store data, about what kind of computers we purchase in the future, about how we scale applications, it’s about having data centers and supercomputing clusters with usable interfaces in every home.
So, who offers cloud computing? One of the largest proponents of this revolutionary implementation of technology surprisingly has been Amazon. Yes, Amazon.com – that place that got started by selling books online. Why in the world would they be into the cloud computing business? Well, every company’s core competency is eventually trumped at some point by another business that can do the same thing faster and cheaper. So, while Amazon realizes that an online marketplace is a pretty good business right now, they also see that there will always be competition from the niche markets who can run their own store with better knowledge of their products and better ways to market them. While their algorithm for the mass online retail market has been pretty well optimized (like Walmart), Amazon realized that they have this huge, underutilized resource in the server farms used to run their marketplace. Processing power is always underutilized when what is really needed (and is also the least expensive) in a hosting environment is memory and disk space. Innovations in server virtualization (Xen in particular) made reselling this extra computing power all that simpler and more attractive for a business like Amazon that needed another business model to make them to stand out in the wild wild World Wide Web. Today, they really are the leaders and innovators in the world of cloud computing, offering cloud hosting, databases, storage, computing and more, all with an intuitive, consistent developer interface.
Of course, there are other plenty of other companies doing the whole cloud hosting thing. Scalable hosting in the cloud (only using the resources that you need when you need them) makes so much more sense than cramming a bunch of virtual server instances into finite slices on a single server. Companies like Media Temple, Rackspace, GoGrid and more are already doing this quite effectively at a reasonable price. So, this brings us back to the question of why you should care about cloud computing.
You should care because the obvious implementation in hosting is only the beginning of the application of this technology. Everything you are doing on your desktop at home today is going to be done better faster and cheaper online in 10 years (or less) and all the data and other content you generate will be accessible to you from anywhere at any time. This also means that it is (technically) accessible to anyone with some computer experience and a little ingenuity in their back pocket. Think about how much of your email, your banking info (online bill pay), your personal life (facebook) is stored online right now. Imagine the default storage of every piece of information being somewhere in the cloud.
But, don’t worry. In my opinion, security will never be what it should be, but I will never worry about it as much as the doomsday security experts tell me I need to worry. Why? Life is really too short to worry if someone will get a hold of my personal data. If you are transparent and have little to hide…sure we all have our bank acct. #’s and other sensitive information…but, if you are transparent about the rest of your life, you have very little to fear when cloud computing is unleashed in full force. Instead, you should enjoy the future benefits of being able to run all of the latest and greatest applications online without having to upgrade your computer every 3 weeks. You should appreciate the fact that the power grids won’t be totally overextended by adding more processing power to them, but rather by more efficiently using existing resources. You should be excited that you will soon be able to get unlimited Blu-Ray (or higher) quality content streamed to your TV at less cost because there is less overhead in the distribution.
Now, there are probably 30 more reasons that you should be excited about cloud computing…so, please let me know what they are. And while you’re at it, let me know how you are using cloud computing right now.
We are using media temple’s cloud computing service call “the grid” for http://www.p3cars.com. Not sure if I like it… there are some slowdowns sometimes, but I think this is largely in part to the site being extremely heavy on the mysql usage… (the DB was like 100meg! ?) wordpress? hmm…
-Rick
Altho I still do not understand the technical underlay, I get the picture you are presenting for computing future—always on the cutting edge, you are, and challenging my ever shrinking brain capacity (do they have cloud computing chips for old brains?)