13 ms·

Why is it cloud everything now?

17 points by rakkhi 16y ago

sliverstorm 16y ago
Why? Because it's a buzzword now, that's why.
dotcoma 16y ago
because... The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion - Larry Ellison
chime 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
3pt14159 16y ago
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 16y ago
  ""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 16y ago
    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.)
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Basically just a 2010 word for the 'thin client' model that's experiencing a resurgence.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
"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".
Animus7 16y ago
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 16y ago
"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 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."
mckoss 16y ago
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.
Devilboy 16y ago
Well at least it's less annoying than the 'cyber-everything' meme from the 90s and the oh-ohs.
g_lined 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
VladRussian 16y ago
the blue is the new pink.
goldmab 16y ago
I think it just means "remote" now, the way people use it.
ajdecon 16y ago
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.

17 points by rakkhi 16y ago

sliverstorm 16y ago

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

dotcoma 16y ago

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

chime 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.

3pt14159 16y ago

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 16y ago
""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 16y ago
  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.)
sliverstorm 16y ago
Basically just a 2010 word for the 'thin client' model that's experiencing a resurgence.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

"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".

Animus7 16y ago

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 16y ago

"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 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."

mckoss 16y ago

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.

Devilboy 16y ago

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

g_lined 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

VladRussian 16y ago

the blue is the new pink.

goldmab 16y ago

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

ajdecon 16y ago

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.