7 ms·

Oh for the love of god, Larry, shut your smug mouth. It's so easy to sit back on your mega yacht and dismiss cloud as something that's always been around and a

Oh for the love of god, Larry, shut your smug mouth. It's so easy to sit back on your mega yacht and dismiss cloud as something that's always been around and always will be and blah blah blah, but for a little startup it's MANA FROM HEAVEN. To be able to do massively compute intensive or storage intensive tasks on demand without sinking a million dollars of capital into a datacenter is the difference between success and failure for my little startup. How many times have you heard "oh, there's a ten week lead time on that server" or "there's no more power in the cage" or "there are no more cages at the datacenter" or "i'll be up all night recovering the raid array" or any number of other hidden costs in owning or trying to own hardware? We check our cost projections for buy vs cloud almost every week, and when the time comes we'll definitely buy, but for we couldn't be doing what we're doing without it. Sure it's overhyped, but so was the fucking web. Yes, there's weird performance stuff and not always enough boxes, but so what? Sorry if I'm missing a subtler message he had, but i had to turn off the video after about 30s because it hurt my brain.

jgrahamc 17y ago
Amen. For my little start-up in London to be able to unleash the computing power available on AWS has been amazing. We essentially buy desktop machines for the engineers and outsource everything else. All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS. It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.
- nobody_nowhere 17y ago
  The combination of (for example) cloud + Hadoop is a giant slayer. So maybe he feels threatened. But the irony is that EMC, Larry's recent purchase, is making money hand over fist from cloud as it ramps up.
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. However, the idea of moving code near to the data is a good one since moving data tends to be the slow part. But that's hardly a new concept, just look at Teradata.
    - nobody_nowhere 17y ago
      Just an example of something which benefits from inexpensive computing scale. Pretty narrow applicability. But it seems like there are plenty of other problems which also benefit.
    - stingraycharles 17y ago
      I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. You say that as if MapReduce is the only thing you can do with Hadoop. It has a key/value datastore too, and since recently a relational database: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html
      - jgrahamc 17y ago
        Yes, I was rather assuming Hadoop == MapReduce. You are correct that HadoopDB is an interesting development. http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.pdf http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.pdf
  - TY 17y ago
    Oracle does not own EMC
coglethorpe 17y ago
Maybe he just needs to visit the Oracle Cloud Computing Center: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html
wyday 17y ago
He's not criticizing cloud computing, he's saying "cloud computing" is an idiotic idiom. And it is. "Cloud computing" is just distributed computing. It has been around for decades. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing) But, it's the latest tech word-soup. Like in 2005 when everything Javascript became "Ajax", everything distributed becomes "Cloud".
- nobody_nowhere 17y ago
  As far as idioms go, it's as good as any. "Cloud computing" != "disributed computing" -- it's on-demand virtual hardware and storage. That's how most users of cloud think of it, in my experience. I was hugely skeptical of the cloud concept -- sneered at it, even -- until i started doing the cost/benefit analysis.
  - AndrewO 17y ago
    On-demand virtual hardware and storage is Infrastructure as a Service. I'd be willing to bet that most developers think of that when they think of the cloud (since, as you point out, they're actual users of the cloud). But then some marketer somewhere (I'm guessing Salesforce, but that's my own bias :) decided that any web application could call itself "Cloud" (since "Software as a Service" was no longer cool. Again, I'm blaming Salesforce for flogging that horse to death...). This way, even normal people can use the cloud/buy cloud services, and it's just as easy as using the Web since it's really just the Web! (Way to go, smart and savvy Internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCloud user—you're so much smarter than everyone else and can expect to get promoted over/laid more than your coworkers still using that ancient Web 2.0!) The Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing is a good illustration on how vague the term has gotten, especially how ill-defined all of the sub-classes are: Platform as a Service, Application as a Service, Service as a Service. Pretty much anything on the Web can be made into a definition of "cloud" somehow. I'd really like to see Cloud Computing only applied to things involving immense elastically scalable computing and storage that can be provisioned and taken offline immediately, but I don't think that's going to happen. The meaningfulness of the term has been destroyed by the rampant "me-too"-ing of the industry.
- 17y ago
rbanffy 17y ago
What are you doing in your startup that demands sinking a million dollars into a datacenter?
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
It seems to me that what Larry's saying is that the idea of software as an on-demand service is nothing new. What he's objecting to is the hype around the "cloud" buzzword - as if it were some new invention and not simply internet-based, on-demand computing.
- adelle 17y ago
  I can feel for him. I often find buzzwords are used to describe things I've been doing for 10 years in a way that makes it seem like people who only just discovered that thing are "more current" than me. It's frustrating, and it actually comforts me that this can happen even to the likes of Larry Ellison.
alnayyir 17y ago
Manna, not mana. Mana is something geeks quibble over when their magic missile cast fails. Manna is magical honey-bread that falls from the sky for true believers. Which is a funny word to use here, because you just wrote that comment to contradict Ellison's accusation that cloud computing was only for "true believers". Well played.

jgrahamc 17y ago

Amen. For my little start-up in London to be able to unleash the computing power available on AWS has been amazing. We essentially buy desktop machines for the engineers and outsource everything else. All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS. It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.

nobody_nowhere 17y ago
The combination of (for example) cloud + Hadoop is a giant slayer. So maybe he feels threatened. But the irony is that EMC, Larry's recent purchase, is making money hand over fist from cloud as it ramps up.
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. However, the idea of moving code near to the data is a good one since moving data tends to be the slow part. But that's hardly a new concept, just look at Teradata.
  - nobody_nowhere 17y ago
    Just an example of something which benefits from inexpensive computing scale. Pretty narrow applicability. But it seems like there are plenty of other problems which also benefit.
  - stingraycharles 17y ago
    I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. You say that as if MapReduce is the only thing you can do with Hadoop. It has a key/value datastore too, and since recently a relational database: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      Yes, I was rather assuming Hadoop == MapReduce. You are correct that HadoopDB is an interesting development. http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.pdf http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.pdf
- TY 17y ago
  Oracle does not own EMC

coglethorpe 17y ago

Maybe he just needs to visit the Oracle Cloud Computing Center: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html

wyday 17y ago

He's not criticizing cloud computing, he's saying "cloud computing" is an idiotic idiom. And it is. "Cloud computing" is just distributed computing. It has been around for decades. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing) But, it's the latest tech word-soup. Like in 2005 when everything Javascript became "Ajax", everything distributed becomes "Cloud".

nobody_nowhere 17y ago
As far as idioms go, it's as good as any. "Cloud computing" != "disributed computing" -- it's on-demand virtual hardware and storage. That's how most users of cloud think of it, in my experience. I was hugely skeptical of the cloud concept -- sneered at it, even -- until i started doing the cost/benefit analysis.
- AndrewO 17y ago
  On-demand virtual hardware and storage is Infrastructure as a Service. I'd be willing to bet that most developers think of that when they think of the cloud (since, as you point out, they're actual users of the cloud). But then some marketer somewhere (I'm guessing Salesforce, but that's my own bias :) decided that any web application could call itself "Cloud" (since "Software as a Service" was no longer cool. Again, I'm blaming Salesforce for flogging that horse to death...). This way, even normal people can use the cloud/buy cloud services, and it's just as easy as using the Web since it's really just the Web! (Way to go, smart and savvy Internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCloud user—you're so much smarter than everyone else and can expect to get promoted over/laid more than your coworkers still using that ancient Web 2.0!) The Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing is a good illustration on how vague the term has gotten, especially how ill-defined all of the sub-classes are: Platform as a Service, Application as a Service, Service as a Service. Pretty much anything on the Web can be made into a definition of "cloud" somehow. I'd really like to see Cloud Computing only applied to things involving immense elastically scalable computing and storage that can be provisioned and taken offline immediately, but I don't think that's going to happen. The meaningfulness of the term has been destroyed by the rampant "me-too"-ing of the industry.
17y ago

rbanffy 17y ago

What are you doing in your startup that demands sinking a million dollars into a datacenter?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

It seems to me that what Larry's saying is that the idea of software as an on-demand service is nothing new. What he's objecting to is the hype around the "cloud" buzzword - as if it were some new invention and not simply internet-based, on-demand computing.

adelle 17y ago
I can feel for him. I often find buzzwords are used to describe things I've been doing for 10 years in a way that makes it seem like people who only just discovered that thing are "more current" than me. It's frustrating, and it actually comforts me that this can happen even to the likes of Larry Ellison.

alnayyir 17y ago

Manna, not mana. Mana is something geeks quibble over when their magic missile cast fails. Manna is magical honey-bread that falls from the sky for true believers. Which is a funny word to use here, because you just wrote that comment to contradict Ellison's accusation that cloud computing was only for "true believers". Well played.