What is the "cloud"?

[kp.ramen]

Can anyone give me a clear, or slightly less murky definition of the cloud.

I saw a Microsoft commercial during the Superbowl where a couple was stranded at an airport but used "the cloud" to connect to their home pc to watch movies. When I saw it, I just thought, "Oh, they are using remote desktop over their 3G/4G card." I'm still trying to understand it, but it seams like "the cloud" is just the Internet, but over cellular networks. Is there anything inherently different about it?

 

[DnetMHZ]

The cloud = the internet.

 

[seepy83]

I was actually just thinking about this question this morning. With so much media attention on "The Cloud", I figure it's only a matter of time before someone asks me to give them a layman's definition of Cloud, and it's not the easiest to describe.

The most basic definition that I could come up with is that "The Cloud" is a system or network of systems/resources. It's a "cloud" because the end user doesn't necessarily need to know what it is comprised of or even where it is located. But, you can put stuff/data into the cloud, get stuff/data out of the cloud, and the cloud might even perform some transformation of that data for you.

There are Public Clouds and Private Clouds. The Internet, for the most part, can be thought of as a Public Cloud. When I pull up Anandtech.com in my web browser, I don't necessarily know where the data for that website is being retrieved from, but I can access it. It's out there in "the cloud". Similarly, on a Private LAN there can be clouds. I run a cluster of VMware vSphere hosts that are connected to shared SAN storage. That cluster and SAN storage is a private cloud. That hardware runs a lot of Virtual Servers that are more tangible as resources, but they exist in a cloud of servers and storage and at any given point in time the CPU/RAM/Disk being used to run those servers may by physically located in a variety of locations.

I don't know if that helped or not. The more I try to explain it, the more confusing it gets for people that don't necessarily understand the technology...

 

[Texashiker]

Computers that are connected together to do load balancing.

For an example - when you connect to facebook, your not connecting to a single server, your connecting to a whole datacenter. Request are spread across the datacenter to balance the load between all of the servers.

What was called 'load balancing" in the 1990s, is currently called cloud computing.

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

The cloud is a place to store your information (ie the internet).

 

[nickbits]

the protagonist from FF7

 

[skyking]

Love those phony ass commercials. What shall we do our flight is delayed?
To the cloud! Download a tv episode from the home server. Fast forward what? 20 minutes to get that over your meager home upload and the wifi at the airport? ROFL!

 

[her209]

The cloud is a place to store your information (ie the internet).

This is a nutshell. The "cloud" is where your information and applications is stored and accessible from anywhere you have Internet access.

 

[Texashiker]

This is a nutshell. The "cloud" is where your information and applications is stored and accessible from anywhere you have Internet access.

So if I install VNC on my home computer, and configure my firewall to allow access to my home computer through VNC, my home computer somehow turns into a "cloud" system?

If I upload a file to my server at Hostgator, its somehow "on a cloud"? When in reality its no different then uploading a file to a server across the hall?

Just like a real cloud are droplets of moisture, an internet cloud are networked computers that share a common task.

To keep it simple, people might be able to say "a cloud is the internet" or "being able to store your files on the net". But in reality, accessing a single sever does not make that server a cloud server.

 

[Nothinman]

Can anyone give me a clear, or slightly less murky definition of the cloud.

I saw a Microsoft commercial during the Superbowl where a couple was stranded at an airport but used "the cloud" to connect to their home pc to watch movies. When I saw it, I just thought, "Oh, they are using remote desktop over their 3G/4G card." I'm still trying to understand it, but it seams like "the cloud" is just the Internet, but over cellular networks. Is there anything inherently different about it?

It's just the latest buzzword for the Internet and hosted solutions.

 

[Texashiker]

It's just the latest buzzword for the Internet and hosted solutions.

Keyword highlighted - "cloud" is nothing more then a buzzword.

What hosting providers are calling cloud computing right now, the same thing was called gird computing or load balancing 10+ years ago.

5+ years ago google was talking about storing documents in your Gmail account. Just email the document to yourself and have access anytime you wanted. The term "cloud" was never used until recently, it was just considered document storage.

I run a couple of websites and have looked at a lot of so called "cloud" solutions. Most of them are nothing more then servers running virtualization software. Last year that same thing was called a "virtual private server". But for some reason hosting providers are calling it "cloud" hosting now? Bah.

A good network admin can make sure that you have access to our programs and documents when you need them. There is no reason to upload material to servers that you do not control.

 

[Genx87]

Marketing phrase to dupe people into buying products.

 

[seepy83]

A good network admin can make sure that you have access to our programs and documents when you need them. There is no reason to upload material to servers that you do not control.

Yes, but a good network admin doesn't necessarily have the resources to replicate data across geographically dispersed datacenters. That's one of the selling points of all this Cloud nonsense in the media. With the cloud you are (potentially) outsourcing your Disaster Recovery.

It's also about Hardware-as-a-Service. If you have some massive ad hoc processing task to do and do not want to own the hardware, you can go for something like Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and rent time on their infrastructure.

 

[her209]

So if I install VNC on my home computer, and configure my firewall to allow access to my home computer through VNC, my home computer somehow turns into a "cloud" system?

If I upload a file to my server at Hostgator, its somehow "on a cloud"? When in reality its no different then uploading a file to a server across the hall?

Just like a real cloud are droplets of moisture, an internet cloud are networked computers that share a common task.

To keep it simple, people might be able to say "a cloud is the internet" or "being able to store your files on the net". But in reality, accessing a single sever does not make that server a cloud server.

Why does it matter how many servers are running in the cloud? It doesn't. And just because there's load balancing or failover being utilized, it doesn't automatically make it a cloud. All you're doing is ensuring that the service reliability.

 

[JackMDS]

So if I install VNC on my home computer, and configure my firewall to allow access to my home computer through VNC, my home computer somehow turns into a "cloud" system?

If I upload a file to my server at Hostgator, its somehow "on a cloud"? When in reality its no different then uploading a file to a server across the hall?

Just like a real cloud are droplets of moisture, an internet cloud are networked computers that share a common task.

It is the capacity and implementation of pre-defined pathway to connect through the Internet to store and retrieve your own info.

By configuring the VNC etc. the way you did, you created your niche in the Cloud.
------------------
In reality defining terms like this is the essence of human smartness. I.e., defining abstract concepts that by one or few words trigger an Intellectual delivery of a larger conceptual system.

The more focused control a person has on abstract terms the more smarter (capable) he/she is.

On the other hand, the more a person puts down the usage of abstract correct terminology the more ignorant, and or lower on the IQ scale he/she is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

 

[lowrider69]

Keyword highlighted - "cloud" is nothing more then a buzzword.

That sums it up.... and it's a ridiculous buzzword.

 

[Texashiker]

Why does it matter how many servers are running in the cloud? It doesn't. And just because there's load balancing or failover being utilized, it doesn't automatically make it a cloud. All you're doing is ensuring that the service reliability.

Hosting providers are trying to hop on this "cloud" buzz word and sell nothing more then a virtual private server.

A real "cloud" service should be flexible, a single server is not flexible. A single server has a physical limitation where it can only serve "X" number of request. With a real cloud service, whether its 10,000 request or 100,000 request, the performance should be the same - you can not say that about a single server.

With a single server, if it goes down, the site / service goes down. With a cloud cluster, if a single server goes down, so what, all of the other servers make sure the site / service is still available.

However, regardless of how "big" a cloud is, its still going to be limited. So you just plug in some more servers, balance the load, and expand the capacity. Where with a single server, you have to install more memory, upgrade the CPU, install SSD drives - which means down time.

It is the capacity and implementation of pre-defined pathway to connect through the Internet to store and retrieve your own info.

By configuring the VNC etc. the way you did, you created your niche in the Cloud.

With your example, the whole internet should be renamed "the cloud"?

 

[VirtualLarry]

It means that you no longer have control over your own computers, programs, or data. It will be controlled and managed by someone else, and rented back to your on your dime. It is essentially the technological reversal of everything that is private ownership in society. It harkens back to the days of the Feudal Lords, that owned the land, and the serfs, that weren't allowed to own anything, they could only live on the land owned by the Lords, and work that land, in order to survive.

It's the elimination of the technological middle-class, making everyone except for Google, Microsoft, and big companies like that, lowly bottom-feeding serfs.

Oh, and the constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure? It doesn't apply, since you don't own the computers, they are owned by a third party.

If republicans really cared about private ownership and freedom at all, they would propose data-protection legislation, which would grant you ownership of your information online, even if hosted by a third party, and explicitly grant your data constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure.

But of course, they are pro-big-business, and will do nothing of the sort, leading to further societal decay, and an emerging police state.

 

[Genx87]

It means that you no longer have control over your own computers, programs, or data. It will be controlled and managed by someone else, and rented back to your on your dime. It is essentially the technological reversal of everything that is private ownership in society. It harkens back to the days of the Feudal Lords, that owned the land, and the serfs, that weren't allowed to own anything, they could only live on the land owned by the Lords, and work that land, in order to survive.

It's the elimination of the technological middle-class, making everyone except for Google, Microsoft, and big companies like that, lowly bottom-feeding serfs.

Oh, and the constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure? It doesn't apply, since you don't own the computers, they are owned by a third party.

If republicans really cared about private ownership and freedom at all, they would propose data-protection legislation, which would grant you ownership of your information online, even if hosted by a third party, and explicitly grant your data constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure.

But of course, they are pro-big-business, and will do nothing of the sort, leading to further societal decay, and an emerging police state.

So why dont the Democrats introduce said legislation?

 

[Emulex]

we called it timesharing back in the 'days

 

[drebo]

With your example, the whole internet should be renamed "the cloud"?

The entire Internet is a cloud, yes.

The concept of a "cloud" in networking is an abstract--it has no real definition and doesn't really exist. It doesn't matter if the "cloud services" you are accessing are hosted on one server or 15. It doesn't matter if they're in a Linux cluster or simply load balanced behind a squid reverse proxy. It doesn't matter if they're using DNS SRV records or simple round-robin to determine which server you connect to.

None of that matters because a "cloud" isn't really defined as anything. It's an abstract.

Can you set up a private cloud? Sure! All you have to do is host an application for someone in a place they don't have direct access to, and you can call it a could service. My hosted Exchange implementation, for instance, is a cloud service, and the servers that comprise it are a cloud. My hosted PBX service is the same way. My SIP trunking service is a cloud service. Why? Because I say they are, and that's all that really matters when it comes to abstract buzzwords.

The concept comes from the fact that a cloud has no real substance or defined shape...much like a network. If you enter the cloud at one point, you can leave the cloud at any other point without ever leaving the cloud. That's the point of the word: to descibe a complex transit network very simply, like the Internet or the PSTN.

Does it really mean anything, though? Nope. Not a damn thing. People who say it does are just blowing smoke.

 

[Emulex]

we used syncronous 9600 baud modems to connect our customers to our as/400 cloud lol.


To the cloud!

Claude Raines was the invisible man..

 

[Texashiker]

The entire Internet is a cloud, yes.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The internet / world wide web already has a name, and its not "the could".

If society keeps renaming stuff every few years, before long its going to get confusing - heck, its already confusing.

I dont know who comes up with these ignorant ideas to rename stuff, but please stop. A rose by any other name is still a rose. The internet by any other name is still the world wide web.

 

[Nothinman]

The internet / world wide web already has a name, and its not "the could".

If society keeps renaming stuff every few years, before long its going to get confusing - heck, its already confusing.

I dont know who comes up with these ignorant ideas to rename stuff, but please stop. A rose by any other name is still a rose. The internet by any other name is still the world wide web.

It's been called the cloud in network diagrams for a very long time, this isn't something new. The marketing of that name is the only new part.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The internet by any other name is still the world wide web.

The Internet is not the WWW. The WWW runs on the Internet, but they are not the same.