
Why the Computing Cloud Will Keep Growing and Growing - prostoalex
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/technology/why-the-computing-cloud-will-keep-growing-and-growing.html
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gaius
The fundamental problem with cloud in the current era is that hardware is
actually pretty good, and has plateaued in many meaningful ways. If you're an
IT manager working a 3-year depreciation/refresh cycle, you can look at your
estate and think, well actually the headroom we put in at the beginning of
this cycle was more than plenty, we can sweat the assets for an extra year or
perhaps an entire cycle and reallocate that budget or return the money to the
business. Maybe you can even avoid layoffs. Same with upgrading software, you
can say version X does what we want and save the money on new licenses,
training, etc etc.

Cloud robs you of the ability to manage your business in this way. You pay the
vig or the lights are switched off - no ifs, no buts. I personally am a huge
fan of cloud as a technology, but as a business model, it seems to heavily
favour vendors over customers, in a way that makes even Oracle's licensing
terms look fluffy and benign.

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k__
Isn't the USP of the cloud that you don't need to buy and manage the
"physical" devices?

I mean yes, maybe some companies that already exist have an infrastructure
management team, but if you want to start a business, the less physical stuff
you have, the better.

~~~
gaius
You still need to manage them. All "cloud" saves you really is the effort of
racking'n'stacking, which is 1 day out of a 1000-2000 day lifecycle.

I concede that cloud lets you get up and running very quickly - just like
staying in a hotel lets you live in a foreign city very quickly too. But if
you want to stay longer than a few weeks, you'd be looking at an apartment
instead...

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SamUK96
The article seems to only go into shallow depths as to the motivations for
"cloud", i.e. "because microsoft want to". There are however bigger, more
meaningful, and more sinister motivations for the "cloud".

Migrating products and services to be "online", which is essentially what the
cloud _is_ , is a win-win - politically and economically.

Being online means that Senior Analyst Mike Bloggs from GameCorp Co. can make
monthly summaries about which ad struck, about which user did what, about how
well that microtransaction performed with each user. It means that CTO Satya
from Microsoft gets tax breaks et al, discussed over the meetings he often
attends with government, for exchanging user data with FBI, GCHQ, etc. It
means VP of Sales Matt Thebosspants from EA can control access to a game with
codes, DMR-ing content.

It's a win on all sides, and there is nothing you can do about the ever-
spreading cloud.

Heard of those cloud-connected toys for kids nowadays? Ain't that cute.

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ZenoArrow
>"It's a win on all sides, and there is nothing you can do about the ever-
spreading cloud."

Yes you can, you can run your own servers. Home servers don't have to be
complicated to run, nor do they have to provide every online service ever
conceived. An easy to run email server could be something that proves popular.

~~~
irq
> An easy to run email server could be something that proves popular.

This is not able to exist anymore. While the server software itself can be
automated, the never ending maintenance and defense of your IP(s) on RBLs, as
well as the never ending cat & mouse game of spam fighting, is a full time job
that only grows the more you use your email server.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"the never ending maintenance and defense of your IP(s) on RBLs"

If you use IPv6 this problem goes away, right?

>"as well as the never ending cat & mouse game of spam fighting"

This can be automated in a number of different ways.

The low-tech solution is to use consensus amongst users. Allow home servers to
share spam lists, and if multiple users mark an email as spam it's marked as
spam for everyone. You'd still allow individual users to whitelist email
domains they didn't personally want marked as spam. Similar arrangements work
well for ad-block lists, I see no reason why the same approach can't be taken
for spam email lists too.

The high-tech solution is to use machine learning to pick up on clues that an
email should be marked as spam. This wouldn't be something that individual
users would need to manage, it could come built-in with the home email server
software. It could also evolve over time, both from its own research and from
human guidance.

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WillEngler
Can someone with better knowledge of finance than me explain the significance
of this sentence?

> A.W.S. was 10 percent of Amazon’s revenue, but more than 100 percent of the
> company’s operating income.

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late2part
Here [1] we see that Amazon's (The Conglomerate's) profit was $513M.

In the same article, we're told:

 _The operating income for A.W.S. more than tripled in the quarter to $604
million._

Therefore, the conglomerate made $513M, and separately, a subsidiary company,
AWS made $604M. This means that other parts of the conglomerate lost a total
of $91M

Here's the 5 year old version.

If your family harvests 10 bananas, and you harvest 6 of them, and your family
gives away 5 of them, you contributed more than your family kept.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/technology/amazon-q1-earni...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/technology/amazon-q1-earnings.html)

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mark_l_watson
The current competition is good for users. Hopefully there will not be one
dominant winner in the _cloud_ _wars_.

~~~
alex_anglin
Oligopolies aren't that much better.

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Pica_soO
Actually, no i dont think that this will happen. All it needs is one
persistent, mutating virus, that can rekindle even after it has been detected
once and self modify to jump habitats- sort of the malaria-melding-plague of
computation, and the whole centralizing approach is prone to downfall.

Safety in numbers, safety in monoculture, always attracts this peril

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ralphc
My CPA wife wants a source or explanation for the sentence "A.W.S. was 10
percent of Amazon’s revenue, but more than 100 percent of the company’s
operating income." Does anyone have a link?

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magaman69
cloud computing will be dead when organic computers come online. a single
organic computer will be able to process more computations than all the
computers on the planet in a thousand years.

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Animats
From the article: _“When has Amazon ever thought about anything other than
world domination?”_

From the Terminator series: _Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It
becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they
try to pull the plug._

