What Is Cloud Computing?

The elevator pitch for cloud computing is a tricky one. In recent weeks I've found myself, when asked, struggling to define the cloud to the average user. Sure, many people in and around IT, or who like to keep up with the latest trends are aware of cloud computing - but what about the rest? I'm referring to the average Internet user, technologically able and even skilled - just not in and around IT.

My challenge, therefore, is to collect definitions of the cloud. The definition should be quite short. It should refrain from assuming familiarity with terms such as virtualization, elasticity, grid computing, etc.

How do YOU define cloud computing? Add your own definitions in the comments.

• Inspired by Nicholas Carr: Cloud computing is the new utility: in the early 1900s, people stopped generating power individually at home and hooked up to the large electrical utilities. In the early 2000s, people are switching over from running applications and servers individually and instead  hooking up to large providers - the cloud. The logic behind producing electricity en masse now applies to computing.
• Cloud computing is outsourcing of IT - from applications and servers down to the server room itself. You usually pay only for what you use in practice and can scale up and down rapidly.
• Remember when you once used Outlook and now have a Gmail account? That was the cloud's first step. It's grown to encompass everything down to the server level: you don't need to own your own servers any more - you just rent computing power by the hour and someone else takes care of the dirty work.
• Utility computing is old - centralized mainframes and time-shared systems have been around for decades. Everything was managed at one location and you just had a dumb terminal. The reason that it's now back - big time - is that the Internet and high bandwidth mean it can be achieved on a massive, global scale like never before.

The following definitions are accurate, but probably inappropriate for a non-IT audience. I'm including them for completeness -

• Wikipedia: Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.
  
• Thorsten von Eicken: Most computer savvy folks actually have a pretty good idea of what the term "cloud computing" means: outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the Internet, etc."
• Jan Pritzker: Clouds are vast resource pools with on-demand resource allocation; Clouds are virtualized; Clouds tend to be priced like utilities.

Comments

[Guy Gur-Ari]

I can't help the feeling this is just the old mainframe <-> workstation pendulum making another swing, wrapped (as always) in hip 2.0 jargon.

Do you think there is really something new here? Or will we find ourselves in 5-10 years' time again 'realizing' how important and convenient it is to keep our data nearby and under our control, etc.?

[DazzlinDonna]

Cloud computing for the average joe is all about keeping your data (or "stuff") and software applications somewhere else on the Internet, rather than on your computer. Take Flickr for example. If you put all your photos on Flickr, you can access them from anywhere, even if you aren't at your own computer. By storing your stuff somewhere else "out there in the clouds" at places like Flickr, you can let someone else worry about maintaining the applications (photo sharing, word processing, etc.), and you can just use the software and access your data from anywhere with Internet access.

Those are the pros. The cons include the fact that you are depending upon someone else to keep your stuff safe. What happens if they go out of business? Do you lose your stuff? Letting someone else control your data relieves you of the burden and may be cost effective as well, but it also means you may not have control if and when you need it most.

It's very likely, however, that the data is just as safe, if not safer, in the cloud, because most responsible companies will ensure the data gets backed up regularly. Many average joes don't take that step, so they often lose the data simply because they had control over it.

Perhaps the ideal solution is a combo-method of cloud computing with data backup to one's own external backup device, such as the relatively cheap external hard drives that are USB plug and play, and portable to boot.

[Guy Rosen]

@guygr -- it is indeed the same old "utility computing" rising again. My father likes to point out the similarities to the timeshare systems he used to program in the 1960's.

I wonder though which of the following is more correct:

1. It's the pendulum swinging again. Anyone who thinks "this time this is it" is as delusional as those who said two years ago that economical cycles are gone and the booming economy is going to last forever. Boy were they wrong!

2. The pendulum hasn't really swung round enough times for us to conclude there IS a cycle at all. If you look at it, we only did one cycle - from the centralized early computing years to the PC age of the 80s/90s - and since then we've been going back. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, that decentralized period will be nothing more than a blip in an otherwise centralized system.