April 14, 2008 23:43
Buzzwords on the web have often been a good indicator for pointing out people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Before this happens, however, there is a special time when they are a smoke signal, rising from a spreading wildfire in the industry.
One of the most recent buzzwords, building in the last year or so, is “the cloud.” In essence, it’s the idea of content or digital property being stored or managed in a huge network. This idea works for data as well as processing time, though the concept of cloud storage has been around longer than cloud computing.
Rather than storing your data on a harddrive at home, putting it in the cloud would mean that your data is out on the internet, easily accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection. Security and encryption ensures that you have control over it, but it does require that you place your faith in others.
Cloud computing is similar to this, in that instead of owning or renting one server or machine, you can rent out time in a large network of machines. If one of them goes down, you start up another instance on a different one. The only thing you own is the information you put on the computer, which can be pretty much anything.
Both of these concepts lends credence to the idea that computers are becoming simple appliances — the portal to your data and applications, but never actually saving information to whichever terminal you happen to be using at the time.
The most popular and useful examples of these concepts in action are the Amazon Web Services. It’s strange to think that a large book store would become host to the future of the internet, but most people would not have believed that a search engine could be the biggest company on the web.
Speaking of Google, another large-scale example of the cloud in action is the recently announced Google App Engine. Although it hasn’t officially been released for primetime yet, it takes away another level of server management in that it doesn’t require any configuration at all, as long as you don’t mind writing your web application specifically for their setup.
Of course, interaction with the cloud is normally facilitated through the use of a web browser. And although Firefox isn’t the most used browser yet, Mozilla understands the need for easily accessing your data and interacting with web applications. Because of this, they’ve also begun making a cloud of their own, known as Weave. The benefit to this would be the reliance on open standards, which would only aid in portability and, in effect, increase usage.
Each of these services (as well as ones I didn’t mention) are addressing needs that we didn’t know we had a few years ago, but will be vital in the future. And naturally, there will be many more clouds coming as the buzzword takes hold and more businesses try to start cashing in on it. Eventually we’ll be overrun with the word (like in this post), but for now we can just enjoy the excitement of looking at what the future holds for us.