4 ms·

Individual nodes can be unreliable (and therefore very cheap), availability is maintained by distributing load to on-line nodes. That's my understanding of it,

• contingencies 12y ago
  The technique is known as 'high availability' (HA) or 'fail over' clustering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-availability_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-availability_cluster 'Cloud' computing is simply another term meaning "using someone else's infrastructure as a service" (IaaS), which is essentially a restatement of the centralized computing paradigm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing The gaping problems with such paradigms (chiefly survivability/evolvability over time) were well highlighted for large scale, general systems by the internet itself, RFC3439 (2002) puts it thus: Upgrade cost of network complexity: The Internet has smart edges ... and a simple core. Adding an new Internet service is just a matter of distributing an application ... Compare this to voice, where one has to upgrade the entire core. My take: cloud computing is about to get smart edges; cloud providers are about to be commodified; and we are about to effect an appropriately flexible layer of additional abstraction to the entire field of computing that will further push us towards a position in which we treat computation as any other service and networked communication itself as a means of economic exchange.