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What is the "Cloud?" and who invented it?
- Thread starter Rob94hawk
- Start date
Basically, until the Apply fanboys start claiming Apple invented the cloud with the release of iCloud
But yeah in all seriousness, its just a buzzword for online services. Think Gmail and Google Docs. Photo sharing sites are another big "cloud" service.
kcmastrpc
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i lol'd
|CMF|SoulAssassin
Limp Gawd
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mattjw916 this made me lol'd
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the idea of the cloud is older than the PC...
back in the day you had a mainframe running all your applications and a dumb terminal was your interface to the mainframe...
now its a server somewhere in a rack and your web browser
back in the day you had a mainframe running all your applications and a dumb terminal was your interface to the mainframe...
now its a server somewhere in a rack and your web browser
Freezebyte
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Which is puzzling why an age old idea/technology is seemingly all of a sudden the big wave of the "future" But then again, we "geeks" are surrounded by tech incompetent people across the globe as well.....
Monkey God
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Because its all about marketing and perception. The pendulum of client-centric to mainframe-centric has swung back and forth many times, and it will continue to do so.
The origination of the term were network diagrams, actually; The diagram would often focus on the internal infrastructure, with everything else being a cloud symbol.
Some marketing troll got a hold of this and had the idea to equate their online services with this cloud image, to symbolize the idea that it's a service you don't have to worry about in your infrastructure...ie, the infrastructure for the service is pushed off on to someone else.
That was the gensis of the term. Since then it has been bastardized in hundreds of new and interesting ways, with very few companies actually understanding what it means. I have been to hundreds of sales meetings about "Cloud this" and "Cloud that", and I have to resist the need to throw something large and heavy at the presenters every time. Novell has to be the worst, but there are a few backup organizations which abuse the term as well.
Some marketing troll got a hold of this and had the idea to equate their online services with this cloud image, to symbolize the idea that it's a service you don't have to worry about in your infrastructure...ie, the infrastructure for the service is pushed off on to someone else.
That was the gensis of the term. Since then it has been bastardized in hundreds of new and interesting ways, with very few companies actually understanding what it means. I have been to hundreds of sales meetings about "Cloud this" and "Cloud that", and I have to resist the need to throw something large and heavy at the presenters every time. Novell has to be the worst, but there are a few backup organizations which abuse the term as well.
InvisiBill
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Obligatory http://xkcd.com/908/.
There's generally a little distinction between "cloud" and just "online services". Cloud tends to be more of a clustered, scalable, virtualized setup (as opposed to my email server which provides an "online service").
And contrary to MS commercials, editing your photos and posting them on Facebook or RDPing into your home PC to watch videos is not "in the cloud".
There's generally a little distinction between "cloud" and just "online services". Cloud tends to be more of a clustered, scalable, virtualized setup (as opposed to my email server which provides an "online service").
And contrary to MS commercials, editing your photos and posting them on Facebook or RDPing into your home PC to watch videos is not "in the cloud".
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demografik
[H]ard|Gawd
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good god, do they actually say that?
demografik
[H]ard|Gawd
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jesus. managed services != file sharing. i like to think of it like this: it's a cloud because you don't need to see through it or be worried about what happens in it - it's someone else's job to manage it. glorified outsourcing.
Red Squirrel
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If you bring your laptop on a plane and work on a spreadsheet, are you cloud computing?
Freezebyte
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You are computing amongst the clouds however you are not doing the type of cloud computing being referenced throughout the thread.
Red Squirrel
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Unless you use it to access Google apps or some other cloud service. Cloud computing, in the cloud.
Yo dawg, herd yous liked clouding while clouding, so we put your clouds in the cloud.Unless you use it to access Google apps or some other cloud service. Cloud computing, in the cloud.
Excellent!
InvisiBill
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Yup. I added links to the commercials I was referring to.
There are some advantages to using a cloud service. If I have a seasonal business, and I know that business picks up around Thanksgiving/Christmas time each year, I don't need to buy more servers that will sit idle during the non-busy time.
Another advantage would be to a small business that lacks an expert on a given software product. My boss doesn't have time to setup and configure an internal Exchange, we have our email hosted outside.
Two different examples of how the cloud can work, and be some what popular.