3 ms·

I am consistently amazed by the durability of this "cloud" hype. I mean, it's been at the peak of the hype cycle now for what, six years? I have been expecti

by lsc 14y ago

I am consistently amazed by the durability of this "cloud" hype. I mean, it's been at the peak of the hype cycle now for what, six years? I have been expecting a backlash for most of that time, and even now, when I make comments that are not glowing about "cloud" I get funny looks. Part of this is that 'the cloud' is now how we refer to perfectly ordinary services that have been around as long as the web, like FTP space. I mean, I walked in on a group of guys discussing their 'time machine' backup scheme for their mac. Now, being a service provider with a whole lot of disk, my first thought, of course, was "can I sell some kind of standards-based something that will let people time-machine to my hard drives in a datacenter?" I got about half way through asking if such a thing existed, and they said, "Oh, you mean backup to the cloud?" at which an involuntary scoffing noise escaped my throat. (the upshot is that apparently you can backup the time machine data to 'the cloud' but the people I talked to did not know what mechanism was used to upload/store the data.)

001sky 14y ago
This is an interesting observation. I wonder, too, how much of this is due to changing definitions of [cloud], over time.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  Changing definitions of the cloud? As far as I can tell the only definitions of the cloud that ever existed were basically: 1. On the Internet in a general sense. Somehow "cloud" became synonymous with Internet for many people and I can't figure out why. The weird part is that people who use "cloud" to mean Internet also use the term Internet to describe the same services the "cloud" offers. To me this makes me think marketing made this so. Somehow Dropbox is a cloud service but gmail (or hotmail or whatever email provider) is on the Internet according to many. How is that? 2. Definition 2 is basically the same as 1 but more specific. People use "cloud" to refer to anything connected to a server except you access the server through a service and all the specifics like hostnames and such are abstracted away. Like iCloud for Mac. I just don't get all the fuss about the Cloud and I'm glad there's someone else out there that scoffs when they hear the term. How is Amazon EC2 "in the cloud"? As far as I can tell its a VPS with some neat scaling features. How is Heroku and other app hosting services "in the cloud"? Again, what I see is VPS hosting with even more abstraction on top of Amazon's abstraction. Whenever I did freelance development work for people they'd ask if the hosting I offered was in the cloud. First off, why does that matter (well the people who ask for it claim it's better but can't explain why)? Second, what does that even mean? If it means will your site be hosted on a server connected to the Internet then yeah I suppose you can cal it the cloud. About a year ago I noticed some copy on MediaTemple's page for either their (ve) or (dve) hosting offerings that say something to the effect of "some people call it the cloud but we prefer to think of it as... (some very same logical explanation here)". I was happy to see it because in the end, as far as I can tell there's no difference between the cloud and one or more servers accessible via the Internet. Maybe to non-technical people having their information and data available across all devices by syncing with a remote server is novel and can only be understood by using the cloud metaphor. To them, the "cloud" is this vague thing on the internets that's all knowing and always available that's the next revolution in computing. To me it's just a client and server connecting and exchanging data. It's been there since I was a kid. The only difference is that now my phone, my car, and even my fridge can connect to it (for some strange reason) but its still just a damn server like we've had since before 56k modems.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    Somehow Dropbox is a cloud service but gmail (or hotmail or whatever email provider) is on the Internet according to many. How is that? --This is exactly it. I think internet is just converging to cloud, because evrything is becoming more hybridiZed. also, datasets are getting larger, so local storage needs to be larger. but thats hard to carry around in a secure way (raid, etc). So, distributed/redundant storage makes sense. But then I want to have mobile access. device is low power/32gb etc. so again, need to rely on distributed storage to enable mobility, not just scale/security. I also think we see this with web-pages themselves. Not pulling from a "server" only, but pulling from all over multiple datasources (ad networks, etc). Easier to just call this distributed storage/hybrid data sourcing "cloud" to avoid wasting thought onn the details (every case different/unknowable). It's a bit of a moving target, then, as to what (if anything) a "cloud" XYZ is.
jcr 14y ago
I think what we're observing is just the evolution of marketing to people with increasingly lower amounts of technical acumen. At one point, "on the system" was understood to mean something is stored on the time-sharing mainframe, simply because everyone used dumb terminals to access the infamous "system". As technology progressed and computers became smaller, more affordable, and more capable, the lingo changed to "on the server" since you actually had the capacity to store something on your "system". The odd part is we still expected the "server" to be located locally (in building, on campus, &c.), When a server wasn't located (implied) "locally", it was called an "off site" server and was typically accessed over private, dedicated lines/connections. This lingo survived for a while when access methods changed to using connections over the public Internet -- TYPICALLY DRAWN AS A CLOUD IN DIAGRAMS! Some marketing person who didn't really understand technical diagrams of networks saw the amorphous "cloud" representing the Internet in the drawings and started referring to "the Internet" as "the cloud." Needless to say, this lingo caught on with the non-technical folks, and has been used ever since. I sincerely doubt we'll get rid of the phrase any time soon since the majority of people on this planet are non-technical and they tend to use the simple "hype" names they have leaned. The most interesting bit to all this linguistic history is you can accurately profile people with it. For example, "Did he capitalize 'Internet'?" --definitely an old fart.
- bigiain 14y ago
  No, we've already lost to the people using "the cloud". When you've got players like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Amazon, Sales Force, etc - all referring to important parts of what they do as being "the cloud" (and all having different explanations of what "cloud computing" is), it's clear the the terminology is here to stay, no matter what it's origins or the intents/uses people once had for it.
  - jcr 14y ago
    If you read my post again, it seems we're "violently agreeing". As I said, I doubt we'll get rid of the phrase. Then again, from this point forward, I have every intention of depicting the Internet in network drawings as a fishing net labeled "Net" with the hope of tricking the marketing types into using "In the Net" rather than "In the Cloud". I doubt it will work, but it would still be fun to try. ;)
tomjen3 14y ago
I do believe it is because it already worked before -- the cloud essentially needed one thing, cheap and fast consumer broadband. 3D printing needs a lot more than that, before it will become viable, while corporate blogging sounds a lot less useful than a twitting refrigriator (which could be a cool, if terribly expensive, gimick). After all, who the fuck wants to read a corporate blog from the people who make your toilet paper?

by lsc 14y ago

001sky 14y ago

This is an interesting observation. I wonder, too, how much of this is due to changing definitions of [cloud], over time.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
Changing definitions of the cloud? As far as I can tell the only definitions of the cloud that ever existed were basically: 1. On the Internet in a general sense. Somehow "cloud" became synonymous with Internet for many people and I can't figure out why. The weird part is that people who use "cloud" to mean Internet also use the term Internet to describe the same services the "cloud" offers. To me this makes me think marketing made this so. Somehow Dropbox is a cloud service but gmail (or hotmail or whatever email provider) is on the Internet according to many. How is that? 2. Definition 2 is basically the same as 1 but more specific. People use "cloud" to refer to anything connected to a server except you access the server through a service and all the specifics like hostnames and such are abstracted away. Like iCloud for Mac. I just don't get all the fuss about the Cloud and I'm glad there's someone else out there that scoffs when they hear the term. How is Amazon EC2 "in the cloud"? As far as I can tell its a VPS with some neat scaling features. How is Heroku and other app hosting services "in the cloud"? Again, what I see is VPS hosting with even more abstraction on top of Amazon's abstraction. Whenever I did freelance development work for people they'd ask if the hosting I offered was in the cloud. First off, why does that matter (well the people who ask for it claim it's better but can't explain why)? Second, what does that even mean? If it means will your site be hosted on a server connected to the Internet then yeah I suppose you can cal it the cloud. About a year ago I noticed some copy on MediaTemple's page for either their (ve) or (dve) hosting offerings that say something to the effect of "some people call it the cloud but we prefer to think of it as... (some very same logical explanation here)". I was happy to see it because in the end, as far as I can tell there's no difference between the cloud and one or more servers accessible via the Internet. Maybe to non-technical people having their information and data available across all devices by syncing with a remote server is novel and can only be understood by using the cloud metaphor. To them, the "cloud" is this vague thing on the internets that's all knowing and always available that's the next revolution in computing. To me it's just a client and server connecting and exchanging data. It's been there since I was a kid. The only difference is that now my phone, my car, and even my fridge can connect to it (for some strange reason) but its still just a damn server like we've had since before 56k modems.
- 001sky 14y ago
  Somehow Dropbox is a cloud service but gmail (or hotmail or whatever email provider) is on the Internet according to many. How is that? --This is exactly it. I think internet is just converging to cloud, because evrything is becoming more hybridiZed. also, datasets are getting larger, so local storage needs to be larger. but thats hard to carry around in a secure way (raid, etc). So, distributed/redundant storage makes sense. But then I want to have mobile access. device is low power/32gb etc. so again, need to rely on distributed storage to enable mobility, not just scale/security. I also think we see this with web-pages themselves. Not pulling from a "server" only, but pulling from all over multiple datasources (ad networks, etc). Easier to just call this distributed storage/hybrid data sourcing "cloud" to avoid wasting thought onn the details (every case different/unknowable). It's a bit of a moving target, then, as to what (if anything) a "cloud" XYZ is.

jcr 14y ago

I think what we're observing is just the evolution of marketing to people with increasingly lower amounts of technical acumen. At one point, "on the system" was understood to mean something is stored on the time-sharing mainframe, simply because everyone used dumb terminals to access the infamous "system". As technology progressed and computers became smaller, more affordable, and more capable, the lingo changed to "on the server" since you actually had the capacity to store something on your "system". The odd part is we still expected the "server" to be located locally (in building, on campus, &c.), When a server wasn't located (implied) "locally", it was called an "off site" server and was typically accessed over private, dedicated lines/connections. This lingo survived for a while when access methods changed to using connections over the public Internet -- TYPICALLY DRAWN AS A CLOUD IN DIAGRAMS! Some marketing person who didn't really understand technical diagrams of networks saw the amorphous "cloud" representing the Internet in the drawings and started referring to "the Internet" as "the cloud." Needless to say, this lingo caught on with the non-technical folks, and has been used ever since. I sincerely doubt we'll get rid of the phrase any time soon since the majority of people on this planet are non-technical and they tend to use the simple "hype" names they have leaned. The most interesting bit to all this linguistic history is you can accurately profile people with it. For example, "Did he capitalize 'Internet'?" --definitely an old fart.

bigiain 14y ago
No, we've already lost to the people using "the cloud". When you've got players like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Amazon, Sales Force, etc - all referring to important parts of what they do as being "the cloud" (and all having different explanations of what "cloud computing" is), it's clear the the terminology is here to stay, no matter what it's origins or the intents/uses people once had for it.
- jcr 14y ago
  If you read my post again, it seems we're "violently agreeing". As I said, I doubt we'll get rid of the phrase. Then again, from this point forward, I have every intention of depicting the Internet in network drawings as a fishing net labeled "Net" with the hope of tricking the marketing types into using "In the Net" rather than "In the Cloud". I doubt it will work, but it would still be fun to try. ;)

tomjen3 14y ago

I do believe it is because it already worked before -- the cloud essentially needed one thing, cheap and fast consumer broadband. 3D printing needs a lot more than that, before it will become viable, while corporate blogging sounds a lot less useful than a twitting refrigriator (which could be a cool, if terribly expensive, gimick). After all, who the fuck wants to read a corporate blog from the people who make your toilet paper?