How Do You Compute a Cloud?

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of "tag that buzzword". The biggest buzzword of 2008 is... "Cloud Computing". You've been hearing about it, your boss is raving about it after a conversation with a sales rep, your engineers keep clucking it to each other, and all the bloggers won't shut up about it. So, what is "cloud computing"?

- Using microscopic, flying, nanotechnology robots to do the work of a computer.

- To calculate the predicted trajectory of a storm system.

- To attend a Powerpoint (less) presentation in which marketing builds beautiful dream-castles of technology visions in the air so the managers will get starry, dreamy looks in their eyes.

- To provide security for your computing network by obscuring it with metaphorical clouds of smoke.

If you answered 'A', 'B', or 'C', you were wrong. This is also the case if you answered 'D'. None of these definitions are true. Cloud computing is actually:

"...a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc."

...according to the IEEE white paper. So, without the jargon and buzzwords ("paradigm"... ugh!) what is the nature of cloud computing?

Background

If you remember the huge buzz over AJAX raised in the web industry a few years back, you might remember how anti-climatic it was when it turned out that AJAX was nothing more than XML and Javascript, two web languages which have been with us since the beginning. Big deal? Well, that's the case with cloud computing as well. Originally, all computing was "cloud computing", only then they called it the "Telex". It was the same principle, really; the software was somewhere else, along with the processing power to run it, and you only had a terminal, where you entered your data and got your results. Neal Stephenson's excellent essay has a description of this under the section "BIT-FLINGER".

A later incarnation of the same concept was the "dumb terminal". Here again, you just had the controls for a computer in front of you, but the actual computing was going on on a server, perhaps miles away from you or down in the dingy basement of your office building. The server does all the work and everything you're doing is telegrammed back and forth, so to speak. The purpose for this was that it was too expensive and impractical to own your own mainframe server rack or provide one for every office, so we all had to share one big computer instead.

Modern Incarnation

Now we have a much bigger network. It's the one you're reading this on! The Internet has already served as a "cloud" for data over the years. Every time you access a document - oops, sorry, that's a "web page" - you're downloading it on an as-needed basis. And of course, every time you play a Flash or Java game online, or even update your blog or website using a PHP interface, you're doing the cloud-thing with software. True cloud computing once again treats your own interface like a simple portal, while the heavy lifting is done somewhere else.

Why cloud computing? There's lots of benefits to it:

- Never deal with the hassle of software installation! The web browser brings the software to you.

- Less worry about what operating system or hardware you have. Got a web browser and an Internet connection? You're in!

- More choice. You couldn't possibly fit all the software available online onto one hard drive. But you can access it all on the Internet, and discard it when you're done.

- It's cheaper. Imagine if all you needed was to edit your vacation photos; would that be worth paying $900 for Adobe Photoshop? Now consider that there are online programs that run in your web browser and let you do the simple stuff you need done. For little or nothing!

Cloud computing is worth getting excited about, but it isn't worth as much hype as has been dumped on it. Blogs tend to do that, you know! But anyway, cloud computing, now that it's being realized, may change a lot about how we compute. That's why when Google released the Chrome web browser, which is optimized for cloud computing applications, TechCrunch called it a Windows-killer. They may turn out to be right about that.

Filed Under: The Internetz