Ever since I attended the JBOSS World User Conference in February 2008, I’ve been getting a lot of junk emails from companies touting “Cloud Computing” technologies. It’s the latest buzzword in the tech industry. With big players such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, it sure gets a lot of attention. Essentially, cloud computing is the outsourcing of commonly used Enterprise software, usually a database or collaboration engine. It also includes the hardware and its support. So all I have to do is come up with a lightweight web application to talk to it. It’s a model similar to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), except I don’t have to manage the back end infrastructure.
The glaring problem of cloud computing is trusting customer’s data outside the Enterprise. I work for a conservative company. Management has uneasy feelings about placing the company’s most valuable asset to someone else to manage. Coincidentally, I’ve just wrapped up a project that moved our customer data behind our firewall, into our own self-managed database and Enterprise applications. For us, we’re just not ready for cloud computing. It’s not that we won’t ever buy into it – we’re just waiting when (or if) the technology matures and gets a wider adoption first.
There’s plenty of chatter out there on the blogosphere about cloud computing hype. I read these articles to start, and gained quite a bit of insight from them:
- Cloud Computing on Wikipedia
- Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing by Tim O’Reilly
- IT’s Global Cloud: Let it Rise! by The Economist
- Economic Downturn Could Force Adoption Of SaaS Solutions by WebGuild
Photo Credit: ptdrumm
Tags: amazon, business, computing, google, microsoft, outsource, SOA
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Ah. Thanks for the links. I have been confusing cloud computing with grid computing…
Periapex´s last blog post..The Battle for Bananaleafland.
At the conference, I also learned about grid computing, which is basically putting small computers together as one giant CPU. NASA uses it a lot.
I have Seti@Home running in the background on my system (have had for years). That’s a big grid setup.
Periapex´s last blog post..Chicken Screwers.
I still don’t get it, but maybe I never will…
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@Periapex: I should setup seti@home again. I haven’t done that in years.
@Reggy: Aw, then I’ve failed to inform in this post! A quick Google search led me to this site that my have a simpler explanation.
Oh cool. I think I got more confused by Peri’s mention of Seti@Home… though I should probably just clik on the link… heheheh
fragileheart´s last blog post..It’s the final countdown! (to Halloween)
Rudy’s blog is converting Seti@home to an email URL automatically. The link won’t work unfortch. Just google it. I’m too lazy to hyperlink it.
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Here you go: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
Peri: unfortch. Geez. It’s not like you do that much with your fingers. Type the whole word damnit =P
Thanks for the link! It’s pretty neat.. but I’m not doing it. hehe
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Why, are you scared of extraterrestrials? Your computer could make you famous as the first person on Earth to prove the existence of alien intelligence. Unless you already have proof and don’t want to tell us.
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