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for what purpose does "cloud" exist?
- Thread starter AndreRio
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You probably are benefiting from cloud computing and don't even realise it. Plenty of web sites and web services are hosted virtually in the cloud. One of my previous employers moved their websites and web services to the cloud, and the results were pretty excellent. Our services could be scaled on demand and our operating expenses were much lower. This meant a better user experience, and since the cost of some of our services were influenced by our hardware/hosting costs, we were able to offer more competitive pricing. I'd expect similar results for other companies.
As far as user oriented cloud solutions, I'd say the big deal is that you can access your files anywhere, and losing a device or failure of a device does not mean data loss.
As far as user oriented cloud solutions, I'd say the big deal is that you can access your files anywhere, and losing a device or failure of a device does not mean data loss.
techtechie
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it would actually be really nice if we could stream our stuff off of it. like include our photos from the cloud into our camera roll and stuff like that.
Well, if you're using the cloud for storage and backup, use pre-internet encryption (PIE), where the keys are not stored on the server(s) hosting your data.
MrGuvernment
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Cloud = severs online, period
the term "cloud" is a hyped up marketing term, cluster servers have been around long before the cloud was but the average joe blow "cluster / load balance / redundant / array" terms don't sell and sound all magical and crap.
i hate the term cloud
and no, MS / Win 8 did not create the cloud term.
FYI 1-5Gigs is more than enough for most uses, we at [H] are not most users.
the term "cloud" is a hyped up marketing term, cluster servers have been around long before the cloud was but the average joe blow "cluster / load balance / redundant / array" terms don't sell and sound all magical and crap.
i hate the term cloud
and no, MS / Win 8 did not create the cloud term.
FYI 1-5Gigs is more than enough for most uses, we at [H] are not most users.
Dangman
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Yes because we moderators totally want to invade your privacy and look at your large collection of cat pictures.
SuperSubZero
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I really wish you'd interactively invade his privacy and like change his login password or something.Yes because we moderators totally want to invade your privacy and look at your large collection of cat pictures.
MrGuvernment
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There is always a server(s) involved......
In the short term, you won't be using a 'thin-client'. But in the future, it will probably become the superior way to use a computer. Imagine if any computer you used was like sitting at your home computer. All of your files and settings...all of your programs...as fast as your computer at home. If your computing environment is decoupled from your hardware, you can have the same experience you'd expect from your home machine, on any device anywhere in the world at any time.
You might think this is crazy talk, but in the business world people are already doing this. At my work, I can sit down at any computer in the company and open up my virtual session. If I need to explain something to a project manager or a developer (or several), we can walk into a small conference room and I can bring my desktop environment up on a wall and show them everything I need to show, without having them all huddled around my desk.
For this to be an every day household thing, we have a while to wait. Lots of standards and agreements would need to be made for it to be a cohesive ecosystem.
In terms of specifically just the available cloud hosting services on the market right now...yes. That does not mean, however, that having a server must be the case. There are plenty of ad hoc models for all sorts of things.
Dangman
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Who said mods were angels? In any case, no sane forum mods are going to go the extra effort into looking into the files of their users. Plus you'd have to be very very stupid in the first place to allow FORUM MODERATORS on a forum you go to access to your files in the first.
rudy
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Synchronization and standardization of data is where the cloud is awesome. The best example is, email. You check your email on any device it is always there and correct. What you deleted is gone everywhere, what receive is everywhere. I treat some of the files on my computer the same way, automatic synchronization means many times I can leave my laptop at work and just come home to find everything already up to date on my desktop by the time I get home. I take notes on my phone and that appear in seconds on my laptop with onenote.
The mistake is to think that cloud storage removes the need for backups. As long as you are not stupid enough to think that you will be fine. If they take away your cloud you just disconnect and everything goes on.
The mistake is to think that cloud storage removes the need for backups. As long as you are not stupid enough to think that you will be fine. If they take away your cloud you just disconnect and everything goes on.
rudy
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Nope. Even if you use a Local account, you will still need a Microsoft account for the Store itself.
rudy
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Hey guys I want to use steam locally I don't want an account. What's wrong with this world making me make an account.
Very simple, an account or ID is a mean to identify you (thus "ID"). Without the ID system, it is hard/no way to verify that you purchased the games.
Even if you don't purchased games on Steam, to chat with your friends, you still need a way to identify yourself (and also your friends).
rudy
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Exactly buddy.
Tsumi
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This x1000. Or at least prevent him from spamming stupid Windows 8 related threads.
You just completely missed the point.
B00nie
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Unless you have 10Gb/s internet cloud is not a viable option for anything bigger than e-mail etc.
B00nie
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Steam is free, Windows users often pirate them thus they hate the idea of having to make accounts. Perhaps thats part of the reason.
Tsumi
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More like someone looking for an excuse to bash on Windows 8 in any way they can.
odoe
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Cloud services like DropBox, Skydrive, Google Drive allow me to work from any machine, even phone/tablet if I have to. Home backups are great, but our services serve a purpose.
I cannot think of a more Orwellian future. Your entire computing experience will be controlled by a corporation. You will no longer "own" your computer or your computing experience. Government agents will be able to view your data and monitor your computing at any time. Your personal information will be collected, tracked, used for advertising and sold to anyone with deep enough pockets. Companies can hold your data for ransom by deciding to raise prices and if you get laid off and can't afford your bills, you loose everything.
It will be a cold day in hell before I use the cloud as anything more than an auxiliary service for non-critical data.
Tsumi
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You must have completely missed the "ad hoc" part.
...Fortunately, nothing about the cloud model says it can't be controlled by the corporation of your choosing. Thus, it wouldn't really be any different than it is now. You need memory, a CPU, storage device, an operating system, etc. Therefore, your computing experience is controlled by many companies already, since at some point along the line, you have to depend on a company somewhere. Even FOSS operating systems wouldn't be viable if open source development wasn't largely backed by corporations.
Which is no different than most things in your life. You don't "own" your internet experience, or your car insurence experience. Most people in the US don't own their job experience either.
Which would be fine by me, since I would not be asininely stupid enough to leave anything I had to hide (if I did have anything to hide) just sitting on a computer in an accessible format. I wouldn't put anything incriminating on my computer, even if I had anything, so the stuff on my computer would be a very lackluster find for the government. Ohh noo! The government can view source code to some applications I've written and my finances! Ohh noo!
Besides, most of the conspiracy crazies around here already have evidence that the NSA is already doing that anyways, and if they really had a reason to get your data, keeping it on your home computer is not going to stop them. If they're gonna see it all either way, we might as well make it easy for them so our tax dollars can be spent elsewhere.
To be honest, I don't see why people get mad about these things. Google tracks everything you search, but because of that, Google's search engine is really great. Big data is one of the greatest ways to find innovation in technology these days, and it's biggest barrier is that people are obsessed with privacy. Credit card companies probably already sell everything you buy. Internet advertisers already know what you search for. The end result of combing the data would probably be good for consumers, but consumers are scared that people will see how much porn they watch, or that they don't actually listen to cool, independent music as much as they do Lady Gaga.
There's also a thing called government regulation, though. I have access to obscene amounts of personal information in my career. However, if I tried to sell personal information to somebody, even if I was careful, I would in all likelihood get caught and imprisoned. In my industry, you can't readily get away with that, so there's no reason the same can't be true for a cloud industry.
Again, that's a very simple problem to solve, and if you can't see how, you have no business discussing cloud computing with people.
Regulation. Make companies keep your data for x number of days, and require companies to release your data to you at any time by your request. Done. Problem solved.
Enjoy being left behind, then.
That no way in hell attitude shows a fairly poor understanding of how all this infrastructure works in the first place so I'm not particularly shocked by the reaction people express. If you have issue with how much data your corporations can get about you maybe consider proper privacy legislation like most other countries implement, instead of freaking out about black helicopters and the NWO. No FEMA camps for you right?
NoOther
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The government doesn't care about your data.
Wait...what?!?! I think you do not truly understand all the different cloud models out there. You know there are a lot of online games right know taking advantage of cloud computing and to my knowledge a lot of people right now do not have 10Gbs connections...
bigdogchris
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It's just a user friendly name slapped onto technology we've been using since the mainframe days, with an advantage of being publicly accessible and more scalable.
A lot of cloud use is fairly invisible to consumers as well. If the operators of this very website felt so inclined, they could host it entirely from the cloud, and you or I would not have any real way of knowing about it. Even services a lot of people use often, like Netflix, are cloud based. So while people sit there bad-mouthing the cloud, and saying things like 'it isn't practical' or 'it isn't good for anything more than email', they're probably reaping the benefits of it. The services they use every day are cheaper because cloud computing has lowered their operating costs. The businesses they buy goods from are able to be more competitive, because private cloud has lowered their IT costs.
Indeed. The idea has been around for decades. What makes 'the cloud' a big topic now is that technology is allowing us to do much more interesting (and more consumer relevant) things with it.
Indeed. The idea has been around for decades. What makes 'the cloud' a big topic now is that technology is allowing us to do much more interesting (and more consumer relevant) things with it.
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Theres a guy named Snowden who would argue differently.
Oh, it's worse than that. "The Cloud" is a rorschach term that sales drones like to use. It often doesn't mean anything, but it sounds exciting and can mean anything to management. And usually does.MrGuvernment said:
Most often it's used to suggest that the hardware and operating system are somebody else's problem. In HHGttG terms, it's a SEP ( Some Else's Problem ). Of course, I have also been in meetings where "The Cloud" was onsite...and managed by local IT. You'd think in the face of such an exaggeration, dropping cold hard knowledge on the attendees would result in embarrassed consultants, but both management and the sales drones were completely unable to grasp what was being said.
As far as this thread; you all certainly have polarized opinions about this stuff. But the reality is, as it so often is, more nuanced. Abstracted servers ( I refuse to seriously use the term "The Cloud" ) make sense in some cases, not in others. It all comes down to the financials. In a lot of my smaller clients, it doesn't make any sense for them to run their own mail services. Neither can I build my own cluster to offer email services at a cost and feature comparative to Office365. So ya, they get external services. Webhosting? Ya, the cost vs benefit for my smaller clients means someone else gets to deal with that.
But I don't ever envision a time when any of my clients are "all cloud, all the time!!!". The only people i've ever met that have professed that will happen are the ones who are in line to make money off clients for doing it.
It wasn't even that. No, where they felt comfortable using "The Cloud" was in the fact that they were selling us a server already configured and ready to go ( a dell whitebox, as it turns out. Retailed for 1200, they resold it to us for 15000. This cost didn't include software licenses. ). The idea being that we just drop it on to the network and bam! Done.
Of course when the server got there, they had configured the disk system as Raid0...and the software wasn't configured...and it was running a version of Windows XP that failed the Genuine Validation check. But hey, at least management got to spend money on it, I guess.
I don't miss working government.
You might just be overlooking opportunity, then. A lot of organizations have already moved to the intermediate step; Virtualization. People who don't see the cloud becoming a major service, for one reason or another, don't seem to connect the dots between virtualization and cloud computing. Once you have virtualized everything, you're basically on a cloud that's managed on-site. The logical next step is to host your 'cloud' off-site, and there you go: Cloud computing.
Unless you're a hosting company, operating a data center is just a distraction. It gets in the way of the other areas a company wants to focus on. It's difficult to be an innovative player in all of the areas that are important to your business model and be an innovator in hosting. Let companies like Amazon and Microsoft be the innovators in the hosting space, so that your IT department can focus on innovative applications and innovative use of big data. Hosting is an economy of scale, so if you're hosting 10,000 * x amount of computing, adding x amount to the workload costs almost nothing compared to hosting x amount of computing alone. Couple that with the fact that companies whose business is making money of hosting can specialize in and have room for innovation in hosting.
My current employer operates a completely unmanned data center. Nobody enters the data center unless there is a reason for it, and a fairly sizable amount of money was spent in order to make sure the data center can operate with minimal interaction from the outside. The systems are monitored and managed off-site by IT admins and engineers. This allows the admins/engineers to focus on the systems the hardware is running, rather than the hardware itself. The development staff don't even have to touch the operating systems on the 'servers' their work is being deployed to. They need only focus on developing software that adds value to the company. But what if we could take that a step further? Hosting and data centers are an economy of scale. The larger your operation, the cheaper it is. Even though my company is a large company, our hosting operations are nowhere near the scale of Amazon's. If we cut out the costs of buying the hardware, operating the data center, and paying half of the IT admins/engineers, we could easily purchase equivalent services from Amazon for an amount less than the costs we would save. This means lower costs, and there are scalability benefits as well. Right now, to double our staff, we would have to purchase an enormous amount of hardware to host workstations (we use thin clients) and expand our data center. If we were in the cloud, our costs to add users would be just a small, linear increase in costs for hosting with no expansion costs.
This is why one of our long term goals is to move into the cloud space. Other organizations I have worked at have already moved into the cloud and are not looking back. I can't see too many situations where hosting most of your operations in the cloud is not a practical option.
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I probably am. However, I consider it more important to get my clients what they need and want ( efficient use of IT budgets ) as opposed to what I want ( more cash ).
Sometimes that means offsite services. Only where it makes financial sense to the customer, not me. I may not make as much money as "Cloud" consultants, but I feel pretty good about the service I provide for my clients.
wonderfield
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Why? Too convenient?
NoOther
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No there isn't. There is a guy named Snowden who shed light on the fact that the government collects a lot of information. But the government hardly cares about much of it.
The most sense IT budget wise for the future of almost every company will be some sort of cloud system. The mainframe idea was a great idea to begin with, and that is where everything is heading back to, albeit with a lot more computing power, better networks, and more versatile software. If you think about how much it costs for desktops now for all the users in a company, when those can be replaced with simple devices leaving the computing up to the main cluster, that will save a lot of money for most companies. You would have to have a really small company to make it worthwhile for them to stay with the full desktop/laptop model.
B00nie
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"Cloud computing" as per games is nothing but an online storage for game states. It has nothing to do with general cloud storage which is all but useless for anyone still stuck with a regular adsl connection for example.
Cloud backups? Imagine how long it would take for me to back up my 2Tb of data using the 1Mbit out line? And all the while the connection would be congested to hell ruining any online gaming etc.
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