Cloud computing: is this the future?

[justfigures]

Cloud computing: the future or in reality a return to the mainframe past? Along with many other associated security, reliability and availability issues?:|

Here I am writing this message on Google Docs safe in the knowledge that auto save is regularly storing the latest version of what I type on a server somewhere in the US. Always available to me at any time of day or night so long as I have access to any PC connected to the Internet. Even if my PC is totally destroyed this second in some freak disaster, my message up to the last save is safe.

Then a quick glance at the address bar in my browser which tells me that the connection is http and not https. Ar well, I am going to post what I am writing onto a forum anyway in a couple of minutes so who cares if somebody is eavesdropping on my connection.

I pause to click on the built in spell checker, I had spelt eavsdropping incorrectly, thought I had. All this functionality and not a penny to Microsoft. Let's check on the web and see what other people are saying about "cloud computing":

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/25/cloud_dziuba/

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3874599.ece

Oh dear. Does not sound such a good idea after all.

Any comments anyone.

Sorry if this topic has already been discussed. I'm old and therefore behind with the times.

Regards justfigures

http://www.justfigures.co.uk
A resource for web developers using XHTML, CSS, JavaScript. Yes it really is. Well its getting there.

 

[Interconnect IT]

Your post's a bit randomly written so I'm not 100% sure what your points are but....

Cloud computing has its place. It's a new technology. But just like PCs didn't kill off mainframes, nor web applications killed off desktop apps, so cloud computing won't kill of conventional computing. It's just another choice, with other pros and cons.

Personally I think there's a lot of hype over what is, essentially, a method of dividing CPU and storage. I always said the intelligence would end up 'within the net' and this move doesn't surprise me at all. Makes infinite sense. Protecting data's gonna be tricky, however, so it's no panacea for all.

 

[KPaul]

Have a look at this video - his internet prediction is quite interesting! It's by Kevin Kelly, a respected editor of wired magazine.

http://ukcloudhosting.com/content/predicting-next-5000-days-internet

 

[justfigures]

Have a look at this video - his internet prediction is quite interesting! It's by Kevin Kelly, a respected editor of wired magazine.

http://ukcloudhosting.com/content/predicting-next-5000-days-internet

Excellent video, thanks for that and shows the depth of what is going on here.
See, this cloud computing thing is going to be big, sort of all consuming big.
Yes my post was 'a bit randomly written' because I am feeling a bit random in my acceptance of this cloud computing phenomenon.
On the one hand it feels like an invasion into what we take for granted as far as rights over how we use our own computers and where we store our information, but on the other hand I use it everyday (Google Docs that is and that is only the start of course) because it is very useful. My belief is, and it has been reinforced by that video, that we are not going to have any choice. Like ID cards if you are going to wish to benefit from services, including passports, travel, tax benefits, then you are going to have to have one. And likewise if you are going to truely benefit from and be a part of the web in the next 5000 days then you are going to have to let this 'one machine' be the central store/brain and you become the external device connected to it. (It is the Matrix!!)

justfigures
http://www.justfigures.co.uk
A resource for web developers using XHTML, CSS, JavaScript. Yes it really is. Well its getting there.

 

[KPaul]

Excellent video, thanks for that and shows the depth of what is going on here.
See, this cloud computing thing is going to be big, sort of all consuming big.

I agree - cloud hosting and utility computing will increase in popularity a lot over the coming years. Some of what Kevin Kelly suggests in his video is quite scary - ie. chips in every item that interacts with one central cloud...!

 

[FireFleur]

The Cloud is just the graphic for the Net

Really any network actually, but the Net is the cloud symbol.

I think it is here already, look at things like, rsync, folding at home, seti, flickr, electric sheep, distcc, uml (user mode linux), xen, fuse, sshd, beowulf.

 

[LINGsCARS]

I agree with FireFleur.

"Cloud" is just the internet.

Basically it means doing stuff/holding stuff online, not locally.

In reality, the stuff will be spread across many servers in many locations. But no one knows that. Maybe different parts of different files will be written to different locations. Who knows how they do it?

It is simply a state of mind.

I love everything being online (ie my whole business, except sage). My building could burn down tonight and all my local backups go missing and I could run my business from the local internet cafe or library. Basically.

The only time things need to get physical is a signature on a paper document, and the delivery of a car. Amazing, really... considering what lumps of brick, steel, flesh and cash trad car dealers think they physically need to sell cars.

 

[FireFleur]

Ling makes a very good point, most business should be able to carry on with a few levels of redundancy.

To go the opposite way, you can run your business off a USB stick, or a thumb sized SD card nowadays.

The other thing to realise are your systems are part of the net, the net is just nodes, as fibre becomes more prevalent, then of course the 'cloud' idea extends, but most of us will be bringing the servers home as well, and using remote for redundancy.

 

[LINGsCARS]

FF, well I would suggest the remote should be the default, and another remote the redundancy. Have no local stuff at all!

You COULD run off a USB stick etc... My God, think of having all your business on one of those TINY mini-mini cards!

But local (USB/MemCard, and HDD as an extension of that) is D-A-N-G-E-R-O-U-S, especially from data security point of view.

In my mind the best thing is one single webserver (or a little cluster) that you run from remotely (with access permissions), and secure backup with one of the specialist companies.

If you burn CDs, copy to HDD etc, you really risk having all your business and data lost/stolen. Imagine that. Ask the Government (every week).

The internet is the most resilient (designed for nuclear war), safe, well-protected and secure place for anything. Just control your humans, they mess it up

Local is VERY bad IMHO, and the smaller device (like usb) the worse.

-----

This is very much like banking. You would not keep £1m (or even £1k) locally in cash. You would put remotely in the bank. You just have a tiny bit locally. Even then, you would balance a few remote repositories for your money, for some redundancy (hope not Iceland).

 

[FireFleur]

Well the internet is designed for dynamic routing in the event of carpet bombing, not exactly nuclear which would produce an EMP that would knock out most devices.

Oddly the Internet is actually quite vulnerable at certain points, though the cover inside a country tends to be fairly well balanced but still only a few backbones.

Oh, it is all redundancy remote or otherwise, there is no one unique location for any data entity in business, you are looking to have nearly automatic backup and versioning systems in place. Git, Mercurial, RCS & rsync are all pretty much part of the system, onto a spread of different systems, SD cards and USB sticks all play a part. If you are worried about losing such small devices, then really you should be worried that you are not running a fully encrypted file system, LUKs DMCrypt works well.

Another thing to realise is flash memory is shock proof so good to have that be part of a backup / redundancy system, and capacity is large enough to store most business data. But the art is in the blend, any one point of reliance is a possible point of failure, remote or local. Data centers can get fires quite easily, and they are often targets of robberies, and often someone flips the wrong switch

 

[DuaneJackson]

Cloud computing IS the future.

Not had time to look at the links and Vids above yet, but will do.

We (KashFlow) have some intersting Cloud computing PR stuff coming up, watch this space - well that space.

 

[Mortime Business Software]

Of all the buzz-terms that I have ever heard in my life, the "cloud" is without doubt the most irritating.

The "cloud" is only a part of the future, and since there is nothing new under the sun, it is also only a part of the past. That is, it is just one of many design patterns in the overall scheme of networking and communication techniques.

As FireFleur has suggested, this "cloud" thing is actually only a part of how the network can be leveraged by businesses. And as DaveIC (InterconnectIC) has pointed out, the "cloud" is not a panacea for the solution of all distributed computing problems.

In fact, those developers who insist that there is no other way to operate are depriving themselves and their clients of some very useful tools which require desktop processing, along with local data storage and peer-to-peer communication, and where applications need to switch between playing the roles of both client and server. Such developers are also depriving themselves of revenue streams which I think would be far more lucrative than just collecting monthly subscription fees for the use of web applications.

In order to get an idea of how this "cloud" thing works, let's take a look at a diagram. The following diagram is probably not entirely accurate, and I welcome any corrections so that I can update it. However, there are two crucial points to grasp...

(1) Nothing happens without the browser making a request for something to happen. This has huge implications for the amount of power and control that you lose over *your* data. In particular, it prevents you from using the 'event-handling' design pattern.

(2) The web application cannot use the browser or web page (the web application UI) to access data anywhere on your local machine (except for cookies which are of very limited use), and nor can it communicate with other processes on your machine. Rightly so, otherwise there would be no such thing as the web as we know it. This severe restriction is represented in the diagram below by the detachment of local activity on the client machine from the rest of the system.

It goes something like this...



Please note that I am not trying to give this design pattern a fisting. Indeed, it is obviously a highly useful and established networking paradigm. But let's consider some of the highly useful things that it cannot do...

(1) You can only perform those queries which the web application allows you to perform. That is, you get the web-application-tailored reports, concocted from *your* data, that the web application says you are allowed to have- like them or lump them.

(2) It is unlikely that you will be given remote access from your own machine to the DBMS which manages *your* data. This means that you cannot perform ad-hoc SQL queries in order to discover useful new information from *your* data. However, the people who are storing *your* data can perform whatever queries they like on it. It's a little like letting some strange company look after all of your filing cabinets which are full of *your* data, much of which will be highly confidential, and allowing them to restrict access on it to you!

(3) The server will not notify the client's web application UI of any events of interest which may occur in real time on the server or on any peer. For example, the client can only be notified of changes to the data when the client makes its next request to the server.

(4) Processing time is increased. Two important guidelines of network programming concerning efficiency are far too often ignored when restricted to "cloud" operations only. These guidelines are:
> Minimise the transfer of data over the network.
> Place data so that most processing is performed locally.

(5) Clients may only interact through the server. So if, for example, client A needs to send a message to client B, then A must send the message to the server which saves it, and then passes it on to B only when B makes its next request to the server. As a loose analogy, and ignoring speed, this is little like trying to operate with only a postal service, instead of both a postal service and a telephone service. That is, the recipient of any message is not alerted, and must keep polling even if there are no messages to be received.

(6) A web application cannot be bought and owned. It must be rented with continuous, periodic payments for as long as you use the software.

(7) Data on other computers which you may own, for example, in the office, cannot be accessed from a remote location via a web application. For example, when you are at home in front of the tele and you suddenly realise that you need to access a file on the office computer.

(8) The server, or any other part of the network which you rely on, may go down at any time without warning.

(9) You have no control over the local or global logical schema of the database. For example, it would be impossible for you to distribute *your* data, even according to the most simple logical schema, to allow, for example, data to be accessed autonomously on a 'need-to-know' basis.

I could sit here all night and state reasons why the "cloud" is only a part of the future - and I'm only a *novice* network programmer! I'm sure that there are many other general and specific problems which you too could think of if you put your mind to it.

Please feel free to post any comments, arguments and/or corrections below.

Dave

 

[justfigures]

Please feel free to post any comments, arguments and/or corrections below.

Dave

I am finding it difficult to add anything to that post Dave. I think you have pretty well covered the subject.

But I have saved it to my local hard drive to be safe, incase I wish to read it again in the future.

Of course in the future when my computer has become just a dumb terminal that option will not be open to me anymore.

Seriously I am considering firing up my PGP software and experimenting with encryption and decryption of the text that I store in this 'cloud'. If the connection is not going to be https that the text that I send and store can be https equivalent. But making sure I keep a backup, yes, my own, very own, personal backup.

Regards justfigures
http://www.justfigures.co.uk
A resource for web developers using XHTML, CSS, JavaScript. Yes it really is. Well its getting there.

 

[DuaneJackson]

A few related bits and pieces:

National Cloud Computing Day

The analyst that first predicted the onset of Cloud Computing reckons the current economic climate will work in its favour. Here.

 

[Interconnect IT]

Blimey - I find myself agreeing with Dave Mortimer

In short, Dave's done a good write-up there that explains it well. The cloud has its strengths but is indeed of limited use.

But for very small firms and individuals there's a lot to be said for it - managing data, backups and security is tough for many - so they need to be looked after. Our accounts are through an online company much like Kashflow and it wasn't a decision made lightly but the balance worked out just fine.

AJAX does help with the performance as a lot of the actual thinking is taking place locally anyway - same goes for Windows 7 which tries to formalise cloud computing into the OS in various ways. That could be very interesting technology...

 

[Jonni - Smartdiary]

Cloud computing is all fine and dandy. Until...

Your web goes down...

Once that's gone your in real trouble unless you have some kind of local copy to work on.

The best way to go about it is to have both - that's the way we do it. Local PC software which in turn sends data off to the cloud which all your other PCs take the data from, you have the robustness of a local application and the flexibility of a web system. win win.

 

[Mortime Business Software]

Hey DaveC. I knew we would kiss and make up one day!

justfigures wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But I have saved it to my local hard drive to be safe, incase I wish to read it again in the future.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I guess you're trying to imply that, because you have been able to tell your browser to make a downloaded file permanent on your disk, I have violated one or more of the points that I outlined in my last post.

It's an important point which I should have mentioned, so thanks for bringing it up.

The only thing I can see which might need to be included in the diagram is the persistent file download and the file upload facilities. I did consider including these in the original diagram, but thought them unnecessary because they do not connect local activity to the rest of the system in a way which allows the web application to influence any data or processes on the client machine without intervention and permission from the user.

For the same reason, I did not include any other files, such as JavaScript and CSS library files, which may temporarily reside on the user's machine. In my opinion, this would have cluttered the diagram without adding any more useful information.

justfigures wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Of course in the future when my computer has become just a dumb terminal that option will not be open to me anymore.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Don't hold your breath! This sounds like an idea to be included in the plot of a science fiction novel which is being written by a very poor author! Trust me – it just aint gonna happen! It would be uglier than the ugliest form of communism that you can imagine! The power to process autonomously and amongst private groups, using clients and servers in whatever configurations *they* choose, is far too useful.

justfigures wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Seriously I am considering firing up my PGP software and experimenting with encryption and decryption of the text that I store in this 'cloud'. If the connection is not going to be https that the text that I send and store can be https equivalent. But making sure I keep a backup, yes, my own, very own, personal backup.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There wont be any need for that when local executable applications start doing it for you. There is networking middleware which allows programmers to easily specify their own secure TCP connections using all the well known security algorithms. And if you don't trust those, you can even roll your own and bung it into the library!

Security is not the property of the WWW or of any other self-proclaimed authority such as the “cloud”, and nor is computer networking. This wonderful set of tools is for all of us to use in its entirety, and I for one will always refuse to be restricted to a subset of the available tools because some companies find it easier to make money that way.

Dave