Cloud Computing’s Real Strength

cloud passing by
Credit: Diego Sevilla Ruiz

“Cloud Computing will revolutionize IT!”

Really? What’s Cloud Computing?

“Instead of people installing software on their local computers, future applications will run on host computers!”

So Cloud Computing is just a funny name for a client/server Mainframe Architecture?

“But it’s not running on a Mainframe! It’s running in the Cloud!”

So it’s an application running on the World Wide Web… like Yahoo Mail and Google Docs?

“Not at all! In Cloud Computing, you own your application and the data running on it!”

So it’s an application I upload to my web host, like WordPress.org or EyeOS…

“No. No. No. Because with Cloud Computing you only pay for the processing power you use!”

Etc, etc, etc.

This sums up my last two years’ worth of trying to figure out what the heck this “Cloud Computing” thing is. I’ve downloaded and then uploaded cloud desktop applications that work in ways so esoteric as to make them useless. I joined Amazon’s AWS only to find it offers little more than my current Web Hosting provider. I’ve read lots of articles brimming with buzzwords like “single-tenancy”, “service-oriented architecture”, and “integration connector,” none of these articles apply a consistent definition of “the Cloud.”

Clouds
Credit: Swamibu

The biggest problem with the concept of “Cloud Computing” is that people define it extremely broadly to mean any application accessed online and extremely narrowly to mean any application you own the code to, but is hosted on a 3rd party server. Depending on how you define it, you’ve either been in the Cloud since you first opened up a web mail account over a decade ago or when you first uploaded a dynamic web page to a web host… also probably over a decade ago. I’ve come to prefer the narrow definition, because it makes Cloud Computing, not something new, but something old that businesses and individuals are finally starting to discover.

Cloud Computing VS Software as a Service

Contrary to many perceptions Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo mail are not a cloud applications. Google Docs is not part of the Cloud, neither are Facebook, Flickr, or any of the third-party applications we take for granted online today. These are examples of Software as a Service (SaaS), and, while they are useful, they are lacking one very important feature: portability.

If a third-party is hosting my data, then that host could vanish at any time, taking my bits with it, as when Yahoo Briefcase closed shop and I didn’t get the warning email, I lost all the files I had backed up in that online storage service. When I migrated from Yahoo Mail to Gmail, I had to pay for a POP3 Yahoo account so I could download my many years’ worth of important correspondence. In other words, my data wasn’t mine; I had to pay for it if I wanted to take it with me somewhere else.

For myself, the worst example of an online application lacking the portability benefits of Cloud Computing is flickr. I pay flickr $25 a year to host my photos in a way that makes it easy for people to find them for creative commons use, and have uploaded more than 10 gigabytes of image data and hundreds of hours in applying metatags and descriptions to them. If I die tomorrow and my account expires, all that effort vanishes from the World Wide Web. If I find a better image-hosting service, I will have to reorganize and reupload all those images once again. My investment of personal time and money into flickr is an important example of the disadvantage of SaaS compared to the Cloud.

UFO Cloud
Credit: Scott Shiffman

In contrast to these, when I ran this blog on WordPress.com, the SaaS version of the WordPress blogging software, they owned the software code and my data, but, when I decided to put ideonexus in the Cloud, they were nice enough to provide an export tool. I was able to easily migrate a year’s worth of effort onto my own wordpress blog software downloaded from the open-source wordpress.org and host it on Bluehost.com.

Now I own the code and I own the data. When I recently wanted to archive my several years’ worth of Science Etcetera posts, I was able to do so with a simple SQL statement, while the same task on WordPress.com would have meant manually unpublishing each one of those thousand or so posts in page-sized batches. When a new version of WordPress had a bug that prevented me from scheduling posts in the future, I was able to go in and code a workaround. I didn’t have to wait for a new release because I owned the code. I am also free to migrate to another host with minimal effort, I simply export the MySQL database, ftp down the content, and ftp upload the content to the new host.

Day 18 – Clouds
Credit: AlwaysBreaking

In the Cloud, I own my data, I own my code, and I can move all of it elsewhere at any time. I’ve been hosting web applications and data on host servers for more than a decade now, as have most of my friends. We’ve been Cloud Computing for an IT eternity since before the “Cloud” buzzword ever came on the stage.

That’s right. Corporate America is discovering that instead of investing thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in an air-conditioned server closet to host their applications, they could be paying BlueHost or GoDaddy five bucks a month to manage this for them. If Cloud Computing is an impending revolution, then it is only in the domain of business to business services, but that’s okay, better to catch up with geek culture late than never.