
Why is it cloud everything now? - rakkhi
http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-is-it-cloud-everything-now.html?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d697884bb5d0d3f%2C0
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3pt14159
This is what "cloud" means to non-techies near enough to tech to have heard
the word (I've asked):

"If my computer, or server, or laptop dies or really slows down, everything
keeps working just fine because there are lots of other computers that
remember what the other lost and they start working as soon as I need them."

If you look at it like that, all of a sudden all these marketing buzzwords
start making sense.

"Private clouds" = "Oohhh, like normal clouds only just for our company"

"Clouds as a Service" = "Oooohhh, like normal clouds only someone does all the
hard work"

"Blah Blah clouds" = "Oooooohhh, I really like Blah Blah, so this must be like
normal clouds only Blah Blah"

All just different ways for heavenly angels to make sure things still keep
working after a disgruntled employee drop kicked a server or your laptop.

~~~
rakkhi
""If my computer, or server, or laptop dies or really slows down, everything
keeps working just fine because there are lots of other computers that
remember what the other lost and they start working as soon as I need them."

See that actually kind-of makes sense in a scenario like a desktop
virtualization. When Microsoft talks about "to the cloud" with photo editing
for example I wish they would just say online backup, why confuse people with
to the cloud?

~~~
adamwiggins
Because it's not an online backup. The canonical version of the photo now
lives on in a remote service, managed and maintained in perpetuity by someone
else. The user's local computer has become just a cache.

This a fundamental shift in how people use computers. I think it's reasonable
to assign that shift a label, and that label has turned out to be "cloud." (No
argument that the term is overhyped and overapplied.)

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chime
It started in the tech circles as a word to describe a remote blackbox
service. Now it's become a buzzword and buzzwords sell magazines, seminars,
conferences, and contracts. Before cloud, it happened to e-commerce,
WWW/Internet, multimedia, digital, robot, and automatic. Right now the meaning
of 'cloud' has been blurred but within a few years, it will start to mean
something concrete again. Give it a few years to find its niche definition.

~~~
rakkhi
Interesting, I would have thought once gone it never returns. Any examples of
words or phrases that have come back to a niche definition?

~~~
chime
All of the examples I gave: e-commerce, WWW/Internet, multimedia, digital,
robot, and automatic. They started with a specific meaning, then became
overused, and now are back to meaning something specific. Think about to 1995
and remember how multimedia was overused all the time, ever where. Now it
means something specific once again.

------
dotcoma
because...

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than
women's fashion - Larry Ellison

------
Animus7
Google found a way to more-or-less reliably process Big Data using commodity
hardware and an underpinning of failover logic.

Everyone wanted to beat Google. The first step (a fallacy) seemed to be to
copy their way of doing things. So started "cloud computing".

Of course most of the players that tried bastardized the whole thing
immensely.

At this point the original cloud model of computing (very thinly interfaced,
commodity hardware as a foundation for scalability) was bastardized into a
sludge of "outsourced administration", "throwing more servers at the problem",
and "shoving traditional product models into datacenters and hoping they'll
magically work at massive scale".

And that's why cloud computing today is meaningless.

Wait a few years until the companies that "just don't get it" die out, and
cloud computing will be taken back as a legitimate description of a
technological approach much like AJAX.

------
lell
"To translate the English term for computing resources that can be accessed on
demand on the Internet, a group of French experts had spent 18 months coming
up with "informatique en nuage," which literally means "computing in cloud.""

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125544523318682497.html>

...

"About 18 months ago, Bénédicte Madinier, head of language development at Mr.
North's General Delegation, was on holiday when she read a magazine piece
about cloud computing. "I realized it was pretty important," she says. The
59-year-old quickly sent a request that the expression be sped through
France's translation and definition system."

------
g_lined
Misuse aside, cloud computing (storage or otherwise) is in its infancy so
everyone is trying their own take. Its real use will become apparent. In the
1980s everything had a clock in it because suddenly LCD screens were small
enough to put a clock into anything the size of a pen or bigger. Now we've
moved on and realised that it's not /clocks/ we wanted to be small, but chips.
We'll move on from 'in the cloud' but in its wake will be left something
useful.

~~~
tzs
And as clocks started showing up everywhere, that transition to and from
daylight savings time became very annoying as we had to manually adjust a
dozen clocks.

I was in college shortly after the digitization of everything started
(Caltech, class of '82). I took a course in digital logic. I don't remember
the name of the textbook, but I remember the last chapter (or perhaps it was
an appendix) and the TERRIFIC advice it gave--still relevant today.

The title was "The Engineer as Dope Pusher". It talked about how engineers
want to do fun things, and so if not careful will end up pushing things into
products that don't belong there, because the engineer wants to play with
them. For example, suppose you are an engineer designing the timer for a
dryer. On the one hand, you can use the common mechanical timer, with the
circular dial. This thing is cheap (because they've been manufactured
essentially unchanged for decades and so the process is highly optimized), and
it is reliable (again, decades of experience have worked all the bugs out),
and consumers all know how to use them.

But you've been reading about these new-fangled micro-controllers. Those
sounds a hell of lot more fun than a 50 year old mechanical timer. If you go
with a micro-controller, you'll get to play with something new. You'll get to
write software. Maybe display the time remaining with an LED progress bar, and
you can do some neat animations on it to signal completion. Maybe implement a
bunch of different drying modes.

Never mind that your fancy micro-controller based dryer interface offers no
advantage at all to the consumer or the manufacturer. Instead, it costs more
for the parts. It involves many more parts--the micro-controller logic board,
a power supply, the progress display, the input buttons whereas the old
mechanical timer was two parts (the timer, and the dial). The parts are more
expensive. It is harder to assemble them. The consumer knows how to use the
old system--the new system will probably require them to actually read the
manual (oh, someone has to write a new manual). The fancy system might also be
less reliable (more parts to break, and the manufacturer does not have
experience with running digital electronics in the environment of a dryer).

Software engineers in particular have a tendency to become dope pushers, from
what I've seen.

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ajdecon
As everyone else is saying: it's a buzzword. :-)

Re "private clouds", though: While many of them are just P2V projects as the
OP said, some organizations are using them in "cloud-ish" ways in the sense of
dynamic provisioning and resource allocation. In a large company with many
quasi-independent units (such as various R&D groups, a group running
production simulations, etc), I've seen "private clouds" allow a generic
infrastructure to provide dynamically-sized resources to those varied groups.
No one department has to maintain hardware; each one can still exert a large
amount of configuration control without consulting central IT for more than
resource allocation; and it's all "in the family", so there are no security
concerns.

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mckoss
The Micrososft "to the cloud" commercials really drive me nuts (as much as I
currently enjoy working this phrase into conversation as much as possible).
They could make an argument about providing higher reliability, protection
against data loss, etc. But them seem to prefer to just sprinkle "cloud" pixie
dust on otherwise ordinary computing tasks.

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sliverstorm
Why? Because it's a buzzword now, that's why.

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goldmab
I think it just means "remote" now, the way people use it.

------
InclinedPlane
"Wil.i.am, what do you think about the cloud?"

The "cloud" has no meaning anymore, it's as useless in description as "web
2.0".

------
VladRussian
the blue is the new pink.

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Devilboy
Well at least it's less annoying than the 'cyber-everything' meme from the 90s
and the oh-ohs.

