"What is "Cloud Computing"?" Topic

I've heard the term.
I've heard its the greatest thing since the wheel.

Is it simply storing all your stuff on someone elses computers? Or…..?

Yes it could be called storing your stuff on other people's computers.

It also allows you to very easily (and temporally )to increase storage or processing capacity.

If your users are widely dispersed then it can make access easier.

You have to trust that your net connection is good, and that the person storing your data won't loose it !

Why is that a good idea?
Isn't security a concern?
And why does someone agree to store someone else's information?
Is there money to be made?
The whole thing seems fishy.

Cloud computing in general terms is when you pay a vendor for hard drive space and bandwidth on their server farm. There is a lot more to it but that's the basis of it.

It can be a good idea if your servers and infrastructure are old and you can't afford multiple thousands of dollars for upgrades to hardware and software.

It can also be a good if employees travel a lot or are based somewhere besides your office, you're using the vendors bandwidth and not your own, a power failure to your building won't cripple your company for hours or days, etc.

For gaming it's nice to always have the most up to date draft of house rules where every member of our group can access them rather than passing on memory sticks or bugging someone to email something.

It's one of those catch all terms… basically your stuff is on an internet server or terminal server hosted by someone else so that you can access it from anywhere.

For instance Picaso, google docs, and dropbox are considered "cloud" products.

Security measures vary, typically you need a username and password to access the stuff.

In my view, it's a fancy name for something that has been around for ages already.

You will never convince this Oracle developer otherwise.
--
Tim

Of course there is money to be made.

We recently looked at a couple of disaster recovery options at work – one cloud based, one more traditional extra kit at a third party location. The ball park costs were 100k a year rental for cloud, the traditional was around 100k up front costs, with some annual annual costs. The company I work for currently likes 'expensing' costs rather than capitalising them – probably for some tax reason or something else made up by accountants.

Security is a concern – but a good cloud provider probably has better security then you do.

Scalability is a huge seller.

Its also the current big thing – so gets lots of press.

I rather old school – and like Tim, want to know that my databases are on a server I know where it is, and backed up on to tapes that I know what happens to them.

No, it's not as simple as storing your stuff on someone else's computers.

The point of it is that you, the service user, don't need to know where your computing is happening or where the data is stored. The 'cloud' handles it for you.

The 'cloud' itself doesn't contain specialised resources; so it can be scheduled for different workloads and you get a bunch of new options about how to use the compute facility.

For example; if you have a lot of compute-heavy work to do, but you don't care about (say) latency of user interactions, then you might pick cheaper compute resources; which are in datacentres in parts of the world where it's local night and hence relatively undemanded…

But you don't even need to know that; you just ask for a best price on doing your workload… and the cloud fabric sorts it out for you.

It's a different way of thinking about computation resources.

Unless you've a LARGE business, or a very widely
distributed user base which requires access from all over
at very different times and for different periods,
y' don't need the cloud.

A good external HD (say, 8 TB) should do you just fine.

My wife keeps a copy of her files in the cloud using a package called Dropbox. Whenever she logs on with whatever device she's using (PC, iPad, laptop), she gets the latest version of the file.

I have rules I'm working that reside on a thumb drive. I back it up to hard drive every now and then but should probably put a copy in the cloud in case my thumb drive gets clobbered.

If you've only got one computer it may not make sense.

It's basically the old mainframe/terminal model, with smarter terminals and (relatively) dumber mainframes.

I prefer to keep my own data for the most part, but I'm old fashioned.
-Kle.

For me Google drive & Dropbox means I get the same document on all my devices, and it acts as back-up

Go to – link . It will explain it in detail.