
The Cloud: No Sir, I Don't Like It - _grrr
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-fruhlinger/cloud-computing_b_855746.html
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mopoke
Can we all stop talking about "the cloud" please? It makes responding to this
kind of article far more difficult. After all, you can't really compare
something like Dropbox with EC2 - they do completely different things and
there is really very little in common. If you're talking about remote file
storage, call it that. Don't get Hung up on this mythical "cloud".

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upthedale
I consider myself a "Cloud" engineer and architect. I build enterprise systems
hosted in Clouds. Developing in the Cloud has its own intricacies, but I'm
getting off topic.

My point is that to me, "Cloud" is a software engineering term. It affects the
way I think about implementing services. However, the term is being
misappropriated by the media (in a similar way to "Hacker") to describe what
to me appears to be just plain-old web services (or paper-hostage-holding
services to quote the linked article).

This is because consumers use these services in the same way they always have.
The cloud hasn't introduced some new magical way of interacting with the
services. Using Dropbox as an example, it is a Cloud service because it is
implemented on top of AWS. That's an internal technical issue though, of
interest to the audience of HN, but not to the general public [1].

To summarise, I agree that "the Cloud" is overused, but is of interest from a
technical point of view. However, the linked article is not a technical
article for cloud implementers, but rather service consumers.

[1] There is the separate issue of how well the cloud service has been
implemented, as the recent AWS outage has reminded us. Having a robust, secure
service is of course important to the lay consumer. But services need to be
robust and secure whether they are cloud based or not.

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mark_l_watson
It is a little irritating to think of people using cloud services without
local backups. It is trivial to backup Google Documents but some data is more
of a challenge (e.g., local copies of AppEngine datastore, SimpleDB, etc.).

