"Cloud Computing"

[Brad Jones]

I'm curious for some opinions..... So I'm posting here to you guys!

What does "Cloud Computing" mean?

That's my question. I know what I believe the answer to be, but I'm curious to hear others. I see Cloud Computing used differently from Cloud Development. In a similar way, there are two different phrases that are very different that are used: Develpoment for the Cloud and Development on the Cloud. These are very different phrases.

As I'm thinking about all the Cloud Jargon, it is the phrase Cloud Computing that seems to be a bit slippery to people. While this is a developer forum, I asked my question from a broad Information Technology perspective.

I feel I'm about to write a new blog post ....



Brad!

[rrodrigoa]

"Cloud Computing" is nothing more than renting computers to run your application for you.

[dglienna]

Not to mention, being able to switch between two different versions of anything, in a few minutes.

Spinning up hundreds or thousands of additional machines on demand.

Many different options for varying amounts of money.

Always cheaper than buying hardware, maintenance, and upgrades.

[DataMiser]

I'm still a little fuzzy on what it really means myself. From what I have saw on the net I am not alone in this confusion. I plan to set up a cloud hosting plan through Go Daddy soon and see if I can get a feel for it.

I am assuming that "Cloud Computing" often thought of as SaaS but I do not know.

Anyone here familar with SaaS, How well does it work, what kind of cost involved etc. ?

[Eri523]

My original understanding of the term "Cloud Computing" was much like rrodrigoa described it. In particular it was much more like selling processing capacity (somewhat like Grid Computing) rather than storage capacity.

Unfortunately, at least here in G'ny, "cloud" has become one of the major buzzwords in advertising. Almost anything they want you to buy is "cloud" nowadays, just like anything was "multimedia" sometime in the 90s. In this context, the term "cloud" mostly seems to be equivalent to "online storage" which definitely is not what I understand the orinigal term to mean. In particular the major communication providers seem to use the term when they want to express that you can link your mobile phone and inet-enabled home appliance infrastructure (including the PC, of course) instantly that way. And of course they're not interoperable in the sense that you need to hook up all those devices over the same provider in order for that to work seamlessly...

Perhaps that already became clear from the above: I really hate buzzwords from the bottom of my heart. Even if the term used as a buzzword originally meant something substantial, after having been mangled through the "buzzword machinery" of the advertising industry, it usually isn'n any more than an entirely meaningless everyday phrase. (EDIT: And not long time after that, the term practically won't be used anymore at all because it has lost all its meaning...)

BTW, I really loved IBM's "buzzword bingo" TV commercial. I don't know, however, whether at all and to which extent this is known outside of G'ny. What I probably liked most about it was its self-ironic aspect, which is extremely rare in the advertising industry. (Side note: A bunch of months after this commercial ceased to be shown here, I read a magazine article that suggested that the term "buzzword bingo" neither has been originally coined by IBM or the advertisers they hired, nor was actually new at that point in time, which I didn't know by then. It even seemed that some people actually were playing that IRL. I can't remember where it originally came from, though, if the article even actually mentioned that at all.)

[HanneSThEGreaT]

I am assuming that "Cloud Computing" often thought of as SaaS but I do not know.

Anyone here familar with SaaS, How well does it work, what kind of cost involved etc. ?

I think you could look here :

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

[accompa]

Cloud computing is the method of getting the benefits of computers as a service, rather than a product. It has become quite popular nowadays. The future really lies in the cloud computing.