

Cloud is Not a Big Switch - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/08/10/cloud-is-not-a-big-switch.aspx

======
jacquesm
FTA: "Your servers and desktops don’t reach out into the great beyond and
allocate more memory or CPU cycles from “the cloud” when necessary. That would
require an entirely new operating system model that simply doesn’t exist at
the moment regardless of the haphazard slapping of “cloud” tags onto operating
systems and products that is happening right now."

That already happens though, sure there is a lot of 'mislabelling' (read
marketing) going on. But thin client applications that use the cloud for the
'heavy lifting' exist and will be more common as the cloud services expand to
accomodate this model.

Right now you can pretty much get storage on demand through SAAS from any
number of vendors.

You could have a front-end to your application running on a local machine and
a backend of 100's of cpus 'in the cloud'. A cloud hosted renderfarm is a good
example of this.

It's not simple yet, and it usually involves a bunch of pieces of custom
software (though MPI does a pretty good job of talking to the cloud for stuff
like this).

The reasons why it will take a while for Carrs' vision to become reality is
not that it is hard to allocate compute, storage and memory 'in the cloud'.
It's just that applications in general for regular users do not need such
heavy resources, and secondly that plenty of data can not be allowed off-site
because of privacy concerns and security.

Another reason, and maybe this is the biggest, is that cloud services are
simply too expensive for what you can get if you spend the money on servers
and bandwidth directly. It only really makes economical sense if you need
large numbers of machines for a very short period.

