6 ms·

Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete

11 points by lmacvittie 17y ago

wolfhumble 17y ago
Does anyone any information on how to handle security in the cloud? Seems to be easier to find hacker patterns monitoring a (virtual) server.
jacquesm 17y ago
I think it should read 'cloud computing makes some servers obsolete'. Not everybody will be able to host 'in the cloud', the kind of data they host could easily be forbidden to pass to third parties, even for hosting. Think of medical data, banking and so on. Quite a few servers could probably be hosted 'in the cloud', but for now the cost benefits are not really there unless your application falls in to a very specific niche. Bandwidth and storage premiums in the cloud make it very tough to position a cloud based solution vs hosting your own stuff. The only case when it makes sense is if you need large numbers of servers for a short period and if you are growing faster than you can order hardware. It's also great as a fall-back plan and to create redundancy.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  You have a good point, but he at least partially addressed this in the article when he said "First, I really like the use of the article “a” in reference to cloud as it speaks to all models of cloud: private, public, external, internal, and hybrid." A company that cannot or will not put their data on the internet and "The Cloud" could at least in principle build "A Cloud" within their own intranet and host there, still gaining the flexibility of focusing on applications rather than servers. Still, I think you have a good point with cloud computing makes some servers obsolete. Some data not only cannot leave the company intranet, but must be segregated strictly from other data within in the same company. This will require focusing on the server. Also, it can (in some cases) be harder and slower to write in such a flexible than to let it be tied to a single server. Doing that makes no sense if programmer time is a precious asset in that organization and you will have a need for massive scaling in the foreseeable future.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I think you meant to say 'will have no need for massive scaling' ?
    - timwiseman 17y ago
      Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry for the rather major typ-o.
- modoc 17y ago
  There's also a lot of software which (for now) licenses by the core or physical socket and will not run (technically and/or legally) in a cloud or virtualized environment.
tybris 17y ago
Sounds nice in theory, in reality less than 1% of applications really need to scale and only one "resource" a.k.a. "server" is going to have to do all the work, simply for economic reasons. Current (shared) PaaS offerings still have too many limitations and lock-in to be a suitable replacement.
dan_the_welder 17y ago
Nothing has ever made anything obsolete.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    Not everywhere. Many rural markets still use them even in America, to say nothing of other countries. New technology almost always forces the old into a niche, not completely removing it. There is still a genuine demand for buggy whips for instance, its just a small and specialized one now.
- jshen 17y ago
  This is true, but I don't choose to use cobol for new projects. In the same way I don't choose to buy dedicated servers any longer.
TrevorJ 17y ago
Because the "cloud" is made up of something other than servers? Am I missing something here, or is this just semantics?
- cnlwsu 17y ago
  I think the title is misleading. at the end of the article I think this sums it up well: "let’s start right now and focus on the application as the central entity to our architectures, not the physical server"
- jshen 17y ago
  Yes you are. You don't have to think about the servers, the cloud abstracts it away. Here's an analogy. High level languages make memory management obsolete. You could then ask, "because programs are made up of something other than memory and instructions?", and you'd definitely be missing something.
  - tdavis 17y ago
    Your analogy makes sense, but it is as broken as the central idea in this piece, and they're both so for the same reason: Despite high-level languages, memory management is still very much a reality for many programmers. People still write ASM and C every day. Memory management and physical boxes may be obsolete for Joe Schmoe, but he's not the guy who makes it possible to ignore these things in the first place. There are all sorts of folks out there who's choice to gain copious amounts of low-level knowledge has allowed me to be lazy.
    - jshen 17y ago
      I disagree with your implications that someone is lazy if they have concerns other than low level bit twiddling. Some of us are trying to build businesses or simply progress the state of the art in other areas. For example, I work in a research group on information retrieval. I could spend hours of my day making progress on IR with higher level languages or I could instead waste productivity on manual memory management. Choosing the former is not being lazy. Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management isn't obsolete for most people is clearly flawed.
billswift 17y ago
Twenty years ago I was reading about how networked workstations made mainframes obsolete, this is just more of the same. Network latency effects, if nothing else, is going to ensure the continued need for at least some centralized computing resources.
asciilifeform 17y ago
There is no "cloud." There are only other people's hard drives.
MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
All of the fawning over the cloud really irritates me. I use S3 and EC2 and love them both. However, I also still use local storage and non-EC2 servers. Everything has its place, and the cloud has definitely not replaced the server for me, nor do I see that happening any time in the near future. Especially if you're just starting out, dealing with getting set up in a cloud environment is a headache you just don't need.
brutimus 17y ago
I'm all for distributed services, but only when practical. All services go down, heck, even Google services have gone down several times recently. So when your boss is screaming at you "why are we down?!", can you get by with just saying "because X (the cloud) is down". Highly unlikely.
vicaya 17y ago
Cloud computing provides service abstraction at different levels. You don't need to think about servers at SaaS (Software as a Service. e.g, Google Docs/Apps) and PaaS (Platform as a Service. e.g. Google Apple Engine, Windows Azure; Amazon S3, Elastic MapReduce etc.) level, but you do have (virtualized) servers when you need IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service. e.g. Amazon EC2, VMware infrastructure) where you need to put existing/legacy applications that have clear dependencies on explicit servers in the cloud.

11 points by lmacvittie 17y ago

Does anyone any information on how to handle security in the cloud? Seems to be easier to find hacker patterns monitoring a (virtual) server.

jacquesm 17y ago

I think it should read 'cloud computing makes some servers obsolete'. Not everybody will be able to host 'in the cloud', the kind of data they host could easily be forbidden to pass to third parties, even for hosting. Think of medical data, banking and so on. Quite a few servers could probably be hosted 'in the cloud', but for now the cost benefits are not really there unless your application falls in to a very specific niche. Bandwidth and storage premiums in the cloud make it very tough to position a cloud based solution vs hosting your own stuff. The only case when it makes sense is if you need large numbers of servers for a short period and if you are growing faster than you can order hardware. It's also great as a fall-back plan and to create redundancy.

timwiseman 17y ago
You have a good point, but he at least partially addressed this in the article when he said "First, I really like the use of the article “a” in reference to cloud as it speaks to all models of cloud: private, public, external, internal, and hybrid." A company that cannot or will not put their data on the internet and "The Cloud" could at least in principle build "A Cloud" within their own intranet and host there, still gaining the flexibility of focusing on applications rather than servers. Still, I think you have a good point with cloud computing makes some servers obsolete. Some data not only cannot leave the company intranet, but must be segregated strictly from other data within in the same company. This will require focusing on the server. Also, it can (in some cases) be harder and slower to write in such a flexible than to let it be tied to a single server. Doing that makes no sense if programmer time is a precious asset in that organization and you will have a need for massive scaling in the foreseeable future.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I think you meant to say 'will have no need for massive scaling' ?
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry for the rather major typ-o.
modoc 17y ago
There's also a lot of software which (for now) licenses by the core or physical socket and will not run (technically and/or legally) in a cloud or virtualized environment.

tybris 17y ago

Sounds nice in theory, in reality less than 1% of applications really need to scale and only one "resource" a.k.a. "server" is going to have to do all the work, simply for economic reasons. Current (shared) PaaS offerings still have too many limitations and lock-in to be a suitable replacement.

dan_the_welder 17y ago

Nothing has ever made anything obsolete.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- timwiseman 17y ago
  Not everywhere. Many rural markets still use them even in America, to say nothing of other countries. New technology almost always forces the old into a niche, not completely removing it. There is still a genuine demand for buggy whips for instance, its just a small and specialized one now.
jshen 17y ago
This is true, but I don't choose to use cobol for new projects. In the same way I don't choose to buy dedicated servers any longer.

TrevorJ 17y ago

Because the "cloud" is made up of something other than servers? Am I missing something here, or is this just semantics?

cnlwsu 17y ago
I think the title is misleading. at the end of the article I think this sums it up well: "let’s start right now and focus on the application as the central entity to our architectures, not the physical server"
jshen 17y ago
Yes you are. You don't have to think about the servers, the cloud abstracts it away. Here's an analogy. High level languages make memory management obsolete. You could then ask, "because programs are made up of something other than memory and instructions?", and you'd definitely be missing something.
- tdavis 17y ago
  Your analogy makes sense, but it is as broken as the central idea in this piece, and they're both so for the same reason: Despite high-level languages, memory management is still very much a reality for many programmers. People still write ASM and C every day. Memory management and physical boxes may be obsolete for Joe Schmoe, but he's not the guy who makes it possible to ignore these things in the first place. There are all sorts of folks out there who's choice to gain copious amounts of low-level knowledge has allowed me to be lazy.
  - jshen 17y ago
    I disagree with your implications that someone is lazy if they have concerns other than low level bit twiddling. Some of us are trying to build businesses or simply progress the state of the art in other areas. For example, I work in a research group on information retrieval. I could spend hours of my day making progress on IR with higher level languages or I could instead waste productivity on manual memory management. Choosing the former is not being lazy. Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management isn't obsolete for most people is clearly flawed.

billswift 17y ago

Twenty years ago I was reading about how networked workstations made mainframes obsolete, this is just more of the same. Network latency effects, if nothing else, is going to ensure the continued need for at least some centralized computing resources.

asciilifeform 17y ago

There is no "cloud." There are only other people's hard drives.

MicahWedemeyer 17y ago

All of the fawning over the cloud really irritates me. I use S3 and EC2 and love them both. However, I also still use local storage and non-EC2 servers. Everything has its place, and the cloud has definitely not replaced the server for me, nor do I see that happening any time in the near future. Especially if you're just starting out, dealing with getting set up in a cloud environment is a headache you just don't need.

brutimus 17y ago

I'm all for distributed services, but only when practical. All services go down, heck, even Google services have gone down several times recently. So when your boss is screaming at you "why are we down?!", can you get by with just saying "because X (the cloud) is down". Highly unlikely.

vicaya 17y ago

Cloud computing provides service abstraction at different levels. You don't need to think about servers at SaaS (Software as a Service. e.g, Google Docs/Apps) and PaaS (Platform as a Service. e.g. Google Apple Engine, Windows Azure; Amazon S3, Elastic MapReduce etc.) level, but you do have (virtualized) servers when you need IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service. e.g. Amazon EC2, VMware infrastructure) where you need to put existing/legacy applications that have clear dependencies on explicit servers in the cloud.