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What Dropbox did for storage, but for CPUs. The classic business example would be that you have to to process a large Excel doc and are willing to pay extra to
by seanmccann 12y ago
What Dropbox did for storage, but for CPUs. The classic business example would be that you have to to process a large Excel doc and are willing to pay extra to speed it up. With fast internet connections and cheap online storage, it could be opened up to a growing number of tasks like video rendering.
- chubot 12y agoIsn't what you're talking about really application-specific? You already have access to tons of CPUs with AWS. The problem is that you need to reproduce the local Excel environment, or the local video rendering environment, in the cloud. That is either something you do on a per-vertical basis or perhaps with some very advanced system administration tricks. Also, video is probably not a good candidate, because it's data heavy and relatively CPU light. The good candidates for cloud offloading are lots of computation on small data, which does not fit the class of things that most people do on their desktops these days.
- dbarlett 12y agoThat was the idea behind PiCloud [1], which was acquired by... Dropbox [2]. [1] http://www.picloud.com/ http://www.picloud.com/ [2] http://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox-piclou/ http://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox-piclou/
- michaelbuckbee 12y agoThere have been a couple attempts at this: and the general consensus is that the bandwidth issues tend to swamp the costs of what you'd pay to handle it internally.
- ddw 12y agoAWS has this for video encoding: http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder I asked some commercial video friends about this once and they didn't seem too interested. Their company invested in a private network for their office and a lot of CPU muscle.