What the heck is cloud computing?
This is my definition of what cloud computing is …
To define the cloud computing … it is
“Any feature that is delivered over the Internet where both the developer and user of the feature is abstracted from the infrastructure that provides it”
The early adopters of the internet almost exclusively used it for chat (mainly for swapping home made starwars scripts)
“The cloud” is the architecture notation of “a cloud” to represent the Internet. The use of the name is a nerdy in joke amongst web architects. In technical meetings over the past 5 years the answer to the question “where does [insert nameless feature] come from” has been “the cloud”.
People who don’t understand computers are in the majority and the cloud takes away all the pain of nerdy computer boffin nonsence such as flexibility, encapsulation, cost reduction, backup, DR, scalability, etc … When you put it on the cloud It becomes someone elses problem.
Remember Steve B’s famous Key note speach “Developers, Developers, Developers”.
This is why kids make facebook apps instead of java or .NET programs. when you develop against the cloud, its alot easier.
2 Responses to “What the heck is cloud computing?”
Michael Janke
Simon – By that definition, the services that system managers traditionally provide to developers for in-house applications would fall in the ‘cloud’, as would typical load balanced, high availability services provided to users. That’s an interesting thought. We intentionally abstract users wherever possible. They don’t need to know the names of the servers, the type of hosing platform or the brand of database. They just see a URL. All the load balancing, clustering etc. is invisible.In many ways, even a traditional hosting environment is abstracted from the developers. They shouldn’t need to know or care about host names, database names, file systems, etc. If they do, then the design is bad. So maybe I’m already a cloud provider? 
simon
Totally !
As a software developer I all you need from the cloud is an SVN instance and a wiki. Sorted.
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