Cloud computing: Supercomputers for hire

From richard zhou bc Canada

We uses Amazon EC2 to host http://billingboss.com . We only have one instance where we lost two web servers in a year so it has been pretty reliable for us. We were at another host before but the fact that it takes 3 days to provision a new sever really turned us off. With EC2, we can launch new servers on demand without waiting for someone from the hosting provider to get back to us. I think Amazon has some issues with S3 last year but it has been pretty good lately. EC2 also came out from beta and has a SLA behind it.

From John

It's like buying a hybrid auto. It is for some folks: thosw who have a greater understanding and don't mind the added commitment of making it work. But otherwise the lack of standardization is too much for main stream now. And, as with a hybrid, may not make economic sense yet.

From Zack, Seattle, WA

Why would I want to run slow software over an even slower connection?

From Jim L, san diego, CA

Cloud computing has no future for corporate computing.

Are companies going to put their data out there somewhere where they have no absolute control over it? Where the security is not completely in their own hands?

As it is, too many companies have had problems with hackers getting into their systems, picking up names/credit card info, or other data including SSNs and the like. Those security breaches are always expensive and embarassing for the company involved. There is one credit card processing company that actually was forced out of business when their system got hacked into and card data was compromised.

Just about all corporate data is considered sensitive these days. Customer lists, future plans, sales data, engineering and design work, employee info, profit/loss statements before they are released, cost/pricing breakdowns, on and on and on. And people think that corporations are going to let this data sit on servers outside of their control?

Another thing to consider: Computing is very, very cheap these days. There is a lot of unused computing power sitting on the desktops of every corporation these days, and no one worries about it sitting idle many more hours than it is actually in use. How much money would cloud computing actually save on processing costs?

From Ron LaPedis, San Bruno, CA

Cloud Computing is what we graybeards used to call Time Share. When computers filled rooms and cost millions of dollars, many companies had a dumb terminal, 3270, or card reader/printer in their office which was connected by a telephone leased line to a central computer somewhere.

Jobs would be sent to the central computer and the results would come back a few minutes to hours later.

Hundreds of universities had rooms full of terminals that connected somewhere else. In the San Francisco Bay Area many schools connected to the Decision Time Sharing System at Lawrence Hall of Science.

The main difference between Time Sharing and Cloud Computing is that the former was secure dues to the direct data connection from premise to premise, physical or logical partitioning (virtualization) of the systems, and no web access.

From Alani Kuye

Great article! Cloud computing is just another passing fad thats no more than virtualization. Every couple of years there's a new fancy term, We had Service Oriented Computing (SOA), Grid computing, High Performance computing (HPC), Virtualization, and now Cloud Computing.
The costs associated with cloud computing are the equivalent of nickle and diming customers as requirements change. Aggregated, customers are better off purchasing applications and integrating them for in house use.
Conclusively, the risks of mixing up your processes in the cloud can create a long term ownership and intellectual property problem. Especially when it comes to untangling processes and integrating with in house applications.

Alani Kuye
Phantom Data Systems Inc.
Norwalk, CT

From Jim, Birmingham, AL

Cloud computing is reminiscent of the days of hardware companies promoting the so-called internet appliance to revitalize a revenue stream. The difference this time is that it is the software companies stealing the model and trying to make it work. Where are the network appliances now? Probably the same place cloud computing will be in a couple years.

From Sybil, Santa Rosa, CA

It occurs often enough that I can not access my gmail account, (by all accounts one of the most reliable web based tools available), that I would not, for a moment, consider relying on the web for any basic, daily/constant use product.

OMG – the very idea of not having MSWord on the hard drive. You gotta be nervy to have it on a network drive, much less some distant server!

From Oshkosh

Simply put it's " great " I got a custom program done I no longer need those 140.00 an hr computer geeks to maintain my system

Forget about software cost that is not an issue it's the cost of having to bring someone in monthly to either maintain the system or set up a new station , those costs were out of control

From Anand Venkataraman

We are open to using the cloud for some procedures – but our preliminary assessment shows that the time for it is probably not just now. In the article below, we try to dispel some common misconceptions about what the cloud actually buys us, and caution against entering it too early.

http://www.pandamatak.com/people/anand/blog/2009/04/mapreduce_hadoop_and_clouds_wh.html