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.
“. If I die tomorrow and my account expires, all that effort vanishes from the World Wide Web. ”
I don’t understand where you get your false perceptions of how flickr works.
If you die tomorrow and your account expires, every picture, tag, and comment that you uploaded to flickr will remain there, forever, accessible to anyone, commentable by anyone, downloadable by anyone, and still embedded in your blog posts. Forever.
That is always how flickr has worked.
Pro accounts are just to browse your photostream back more than 200. The pictures themselves don’t disappear.
Stop flickr misinformation. :)
Comment by ClintJCL — November 15, 2010 @ 8:59 am
[[[ Oh, and pro accounts other main feature is being able to upload lots of pictures every month, instead of their non-pro very low monthly limit (20M? 30M?). ]]]
Comment by ClintJCL — November 15, 2010 @ 9:01 am
I see the cloud as a passport to IT flexibility. An IT world where costs are cut and data is managed in a way that allows scalability. Sure, every one and then some, is trying to give the cloud a label and a definition. But isn’t the beauty about the cloud that it can’t really have the one definition stamp? It is different for all types of businesses, and they too can alter what it does for them. The true beauty of cloud computing is that it has only just begun and its true potential is yet to be seen.
Comment by Cloud_Zone — November 15, 2010 @ 10:05 am
“If you die tomorrow and your account expires, every picture, tag, and comment that you uploaded to flickr will remain there, forever, accessible to anyone, commentable by anyone, downloadable by anyone, and still embedded in your blog posts. Forever.”
Until Flickr decides to change its terms of service(not that a company would EVER do that), or someone buys them out, or …
Comment by Chriggy — November 15, 2010 @ 6:28 pm
Clint,
You’re right. I should have been more careful with my wording. What I should have said is that if I die tomorrow and my flickr account expires, then 97% of the 6,431 photos I’ve uploaded would vanish from my photostream. It was very misleading of me to not credit flickr for generously keeping the last 200 photos I uploaded accessible and whatever people had already hotlinked.
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157625373798466/
http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/
If my account expires, the content may still exist online, but if people can’t find it, then it might as well not exist.
Comment by ideonexus — November 15, 2010 @ 8:56 pm
Eh, maybe I’m jaded but cloud doesn’t really impress me. Even the definition you offer, which I can fully agree with, is still basically SaaS – it’s just that you’re providing your own S’s.
There’s really no functional difference between the ‘new’ cloud and the Unix terminal services I used as a freshman at ODU back in 1232 AD. What’s new is that the network has grown to the point where it can support very snazzy services via terminal, and storage has gotten so cheap that you can (once again) freeride on someone else’s well-managed data center, instead of storing your data locally where it’s inaccessible unless you drag your computer around with you.
One big clue to where we’re at with SaaS/cloud is that the various thin client boxes that are on the market for virtual desktop enterprises are all about the same price as a netbook or low-end laptop.
Comment by Stacy — November 15, 2010 @ 11:57 pm
Thank you~
What the wonderful effort to make it clear~
Comment by Ted — November 16, 2010 @ 6:24 am
Thank you~
What the wonderful effort to make it clear~
Comment by Ted — November 16, 2010 @ 6:24 am
Ryan,
I still don’t even know that I would consider “vanish from the photostream” to be accurate wording for what happens. They’re still in the stream; the stream is just not browseable past the first 10 pages.
But that doesn’t matter as much as people think.
If you look at your referral stats regularly, you’ll see that the vast majority of photo views are not people looking through a photostream anyway.
About 50% of photo views [for my typical stats, anyway], come from google searches.
Typically, people only view the most recent pages of your photostream anyway. It is very rare, for example, for someone to come in and look through more than 10 pages of your photostream on average.
Usually, people come to an image straight from google. Even the 50% that come from flickr are typically looking for specific tags, or using flickr’s search.
Looking at my stats yesterday, about 22 people browsed my photostream, but I had 3,333 views (a typical slow day for me, I get 5K-8K on good days).
So having a non pro would end up preventing only 1% of my photos from being viewed. And, of course, it would keep people from getting the BIG original size.
But they don’t really disappear. Most typical viewing will continue regardless of whether you pay. Flickr can’t make photos de-list from google – there’s a great swath of views right there.
I don’t believe flickr delists these from flickr’s internal searches either; tho it’s really hard to prove this. One way would be to look at the last picture in Carolyn’s stream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolyncasl/54966840/
It is currently findable via a flickr search:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=dawn-vicky-shelby-hiking-sat&w=all
As well as by a google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=dawn-vicky-shelby-hiking-sat&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Once she uploads one more picture, this will “fall off the back” of her visible stream. Google’s still gonna list it. I’m pretty sure (but not 100%) that flickr’s still gonna list it. And those 2 methods account for 98% of views (for my typical stats).
Comment by ClintJCL — November 16, 2010 @ 9:22 am
Stacy,
Those are great observations. I agree that the whole “Cloud” thing seems very over-hyped, and most people are using the term synonymous with SaaS. The thin-client observation is very telling too–although I think the client machines could go much thinner on hardware specs (Why won’t Netbooks drop below $200???). In my playing with the Google OS, which is basically just the Chrome browser as an operating system, it could take very little to run the OS, but I also saw the OS as ultimately unusable for PC applications.
Clint,
The fact that you pointed me to the last photo available to view in Carolyn’s photostream instead of pointing me to the last photo to vanish from Carolyn’s photostream pretty much proves my point. If you let the account lapse, you lose the collections, sets, and chronology of your photos. All organizational structure is lost. The photos are far more valuable semantically in collections that relate them than as thousands of unrelated photos dispersed across Google images.
As for the sitestats you provide, we have very different stats due to the different ways we use the service. Nearly 50% of my traffic comes from flickr because my photos are intended for reference and creative commons use: people find them because they are looking for specific free-use photos for their blog, article, or wikipedia article. Also, a great deal of my traffic comes from people looking for sets and collections of photos that combine to illustrate a location (like the Rally to Restore Sanity or a Museum). Other search engines account for less than 24% of my traffic, with Google averaging about 8% of the total.
Criggy made a very important point about us being subject to the terms of service whims of the SaaS gods. In fact, flickr used to delete your photos 60 days after your Pro Account expired, but has apparently changed this policy in recent years to be less damaging; however, if they decide to change their billing policy to increase yearly Pro Account costs, I have no choice but to comply or screen scrape my account with a script if I don’t want to lose my photo collections.
One of the forums I read on Pro Accounts expiring had a very good observation, that flickr is not an online storage tool, but a social networking service built around photography. You’re not paying for them to store your photos, you’re paying to make those photos available to a community. That’s an important distinction, which makes flickr trashing all our hard work if we don’t pay a little more justifiable, but it still demonstrates that hosting your own images in the cloud is vastly superior.
Comment by ideonexus — November 16, 2010 @ 10:56 pm
It’s not just most people using the definition of cloud computing synonymously wit SaaS. NIST actually includes SaaS as one of the service models for “cloud computing” in its definition. I tried to include a link, but it seems to make this comment get marked as spam.
My personal opinion? It’s nothing but a new corporate buzzword for something that has existed a long time, and I’m going to have to agree with Stacy in that I don’t see much difference between it, and shelling into an account decades ago. The interface may have gotten slicker, but the concept is the same.
Comment by Chriggy — November 17, 2010 @ 12:38 am
“Nearly 50% of my traffic comes from flickr because my photos are intended for reference and creative commons use: people find them because they are looking for specific free-use photos for their blog, article, or wikipedia article. ”
Same here, Ryan. But none of those are photostream views. Those are people on flickr doing searches for various tags, and searching through flickr’s search engine. You did not look at your stats closely enough to determine photo views. 50% is meaningless and is no different from my states, and my photos are creative commons too. The point is, out of those flickr referrals, most are not photostream views. They are uses of flickr’s search engine.
Also, your link to a comment about flickr deleting your photos in 60 days was a comment not posted by staff, but by someone else confused about policy. If you actually click through to the official help, drop down “I can’t see my photos”, you can go and read yourself how flickr itself says they never delete your photos. They may delete your account, if it’s free and you ignore it for 90 days, but the photos are still there.
Basically, I think you still aren’t at full understanding about how it works, and it seems that you simply read “50% flickr referral” in your stats and think that means photostream views, which it does not. You have to click into your referrers and look at your flickr referrers in detail. I’m willing to bet a great deal of them are searches, which have nothing to do with your photostream. For me, 99% of my flickr referrals are not photostream views.
Comment by ClintJCL — November 17, 2010 @ 10:53 am
P.S. http://www.flickr.com/photos/bblfish/1392992932/
Note that when you go into the photostream, this photo is not there. But the photo page still is, and it’s still searchable via flickr search and google search, which is 99% of the ways people get to photos [for my stats, and, I think once you look at your stats in detail, for yours too].
Notice that the last page of his free photostream only goes back to 2008, but this was uploaded in 2007. It’s still there.
Flickr search that points to this picture, not listed in photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=2&w=all&q=%22One+Second+Before+Awakening+from+a+Dream+-+Dali%22&m=text
I would have made an example with one of Carolyn’s photos, but I don’t know anything about hers to search for hers.
Some people create a private group and submit all their photos to a private group, thereby scamming flickr by having an alternate place for an infinite-limit stream to pick up.
Basically, account going free does not make pictures disappear, and only prevents 1% of views. I stand by that.
Comment by ClintJCL — November 17, 2010 @ 11:00 am
Ironically, I found the above photo on a post with someone saying “compare flickr to picasa”. The picasa link to the same picture was dead. Made me laugh.
Comment by ClintJCL — November 17, 2010 @ 11:01 am
As mentioned before, all of that is a moot point if flickr changes its TOS regarding not deleting images(and they do explicitly reserve the right to do so).
Comment by Chriggy — November 17, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
Clint,
You said:
Incorrect. Look at who made the statement. They have the label “Staff” under their profile picture, and they wrote:
Flickr staff member said it = Official Flickr Policy at the time. What their current policy FAQ says is irrelevant to my point.
You’re not really understanding my points on this issue, which have nothing to do with photostreams and traffic. So I’m going to let this drop.
ry
Comment by ideonexus — November 21, 2010 @ 11:40 am
I was only ever arguing that saying “my photos will have disappeared” is completely inaccurate.
Operative word in your comment was “at the time”. In his comment he specifically said it was a beta faq, and the 60 day thing isn’t in the faq now. Past != present.
Here’s the official answer, one that is in the faq now, in the present:
http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#73
“Are my photos ever deleted?
No, your photos will not be deleted, unless you do it yourself, or fail to play by our Community Guidelines.”
So I stand by my initial quibble, and have *current* links to flickr faq, not old comments about beta faqs, that specifically stand by what I said.
Comment by ClintJCL — November 21, 2010 @ 2:14 pm
ROFL @ pedantic argument.
Comment by Chriggy — November 21, 2010 @ 5:02 pm
Says the pot to the kettle.
Comment by ClintJCL — November 21, 2010 @ 5:36 pm
Time to beat a dead horse. Flickr’s Twitter account recently posted a statement confirming what I’ve said: Your flickr photos never disappear:
http://blog.flickr.net/2011/05/26/your-photos-and-data-on-flickr/
Only way to make them disappear is to delete your account. Not stop paying, but actually delete. And even then, they keep them for 90 days.
I never disagreed with the spirit of what Ryan originally wrote. It was the letter. Flickr pictures do not go away. At least not as long as flickr is around.
Comment by ClintJCL aka Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos — June 2, 2011 @ 9:11 am