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Agreed. The following statement the author makes is too generalized in my opinion: > What we seem to forget all too easily is that the cloud is, in its simples

Agreed. The following statement the author makes is too generalized in my opinion: > What we seem to forget all too easily is that the cloud is, in its simplest form, just someone else’s computer. This isn't even actually true for Infrastructure as a Sevice (IaaS), in which case there's significant intellectual capital that's been invested in the automated provisioning of resources for customers. This is much more true with SaaS products. In this case, the customers of #NA14 did experience downtime. But they also got the full expertise of the salesforce engineering organization (which clearly is far from incompetent) being brought to bear on the problem, at no extra charge to them as a customer, as well as having likely already mitigated instances of this problem before. These prior mitigations, of course, are met with much less fanfare than an outage. It's hard to appreciate things you don't experience.

stephenr 10y ago
> > What we seem to forget all too easily is that the cloud is, in its simplest form, just someone else’s computer. > This isn't even actually true for Infrastructure as a Sevice (IaaS), in which case there's significant intellectual capital that's been invested in the automated provisioning of resources for customers. This is much more true with SaaS products. Does all the "intellectual capital" (read: aws/etc runs a highly complex system made up of various parts that sometimes all just shit themselves when a single low level thing hiccups) make it somehow not someone else's computer? The point of "it's just someone else's computer" isn't that it's just a computer like you or I have, it's that it's not some magical, mythical beast. The greatest achievement of aws/et-al is convincing developers they will need "web scale" infrastructure at the drop of a hat.
- andrewstuart2 10y ago
  What I'm saying is that you can't justifiably say that it's "just someone else's computer" (emphasis mine). Just someone else's computer would be ssh root access to a physical machine in some data center. No tenancy separation, no dynamic allocation, no exposure of failure tolerances (e.g. AWS Availability Zones), etc. To illustrate this point succinctly, there are probably thousands of "somebody else's computers" sitting in a dell warehouse somewhere that are no good to me. The cloud is only useful if there are additional services to help me consume that computer. I'm not saying it doesn't run on somebody else's computer. I could, though, since private clouds are in fact "clouds" that are not someone else's computer. Again, what I'm saying is that it is not a sufficiently specific generalization to accurately describe "cloud." The definition of "cloud" is fundamentally more complex than "just somebody else's computer."

stephenr 10y ago

> > What we seem to forget all too easily is that the cloud is, in its simplest form, just someone else’s computer. > This isn't even actually true for Infrastructure as a Sevice (IaaS), in which case there's significant intellectual capital that's been invested in the automated provisioning of resources for customers. This is much more true with SaaS products. Does all the "intellectual capital" (read: aws/etc runs a highly complex system made up of various parts that sometimes all just shit themselves when a single low level thing hiccups) make it somehow not someone else's computer? The point of "it's just someone else's computer" isn't that it's just a computer like you or I have, it's that it's not some magical, mythical beast. The greatest achievement of aws/et-al is convincing developers they will need "web scale" infrastructure at the drop of a hat.

andrewstuart2 10y ago
What I'm saying is that you can't justifiably say that it's "just someone else's computer" (emphasis mine). Just someone else's computer would be ssh root access to a physical machine in some data center. No tenancy separation, no dynamic allocation, no exposure of failure tolerances (e.g. AWS Availability Zones), etc. To illustrate this point succinctly, there are probably thousands of "somebody else's computers" sitting in a dell warehouse somewhere that are no good to me. The cloud is only useful if there are additional services to help me consume that computer. I'm not saying it doesn't run on somebody else's computer. I could, though, since private clouds are in fact "clouds" that are not someone else's computer. Again, what I'm saying is that it is not a sufficiently specific generalization to accurately describe "cloud." The definition of "cloud" is fundamentally more complex than "just somebody else's computer."