What is the Cloud ?

[Moby-Dick]

Something I get asked by many an IT Manager - the following video is VMware's intpretation of it (its also well done and quite funny

so next time you get asked , point them this way...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxpmyla-IXU

[badass]

There's so much hype and bollards surrounding cloud computing as there always is around a new technology or simply a new way of doing things in IT.
The problem is, we often see people that have "seen it all before" and fail to see areas where it's useful. My previous two managers were like that about virtualisation, and it showed them to be the complete knuckle dragging morons they are.
Cloud computing however is different. IMHO it is almost a perfect way for a small business to get their IT set up and managed for a low initial start up cost and without the worry of maintaining the infrastructure. For larger companies, it is potentially usefull for outsourcing short term solutions. For a medium to large multinational, it's vastly overhyped and not a lot of use.

[Funkstar]

For large multinationals it does eliminate a lot of risk for development and rapidly changing projects, it means they don't have to worry about it effecting their heavily controlled and tightly managed systems. There may be several layers of authorisation to get new software rolled out on in house systems, but uploading to the cloud could get round that. But that's all about how the company and the management of their systems is concerned I guess.

[Tomahawk]

Interesting video take; hotly debated topic and idea. Great post!
Virtualisation/abstraction definitely seem to be the way forward... the 'cloud' setting the benchmark for the level of scalable abstraction required to make it commercially viable. An interesting area of computing especially when you being to delve into the complexities of the foundations.

[TAKTAK]

It's one of these things:



Hope this helps clear it up for you

Edit: i see that the video has already covered this...

Edit 2: That's rather good , actual lol at the matrix

[Moby-Dick]

There's so much hype and bollards surrounding cloud computing as there always is around a new technology or simply a new way of doing things in IT.
The problem is, we often see people that have "seen it all before" and fail to see areas where it's useful. My previous two managers were like that about virtualisation, and it showed them to be the complete knuckle dragging morons they are.
Cloud computing however is different. IMHO it is almost a perfect way for a small business to get their IT set up and managed for a low initial start up cost and without the worry of maintaining the infrastructure. For larger companies, it is potentially usefull for outsourcing short term solutions. For a medium to large multinational, it's vastly overhyped and not a lot of use.

You are quite right - I think "cloud" based services for SMB make the biggest sence , especially from a business continuity perspective. From the point of view of my employer I dont think we woudl be ready for public cloud hosting just yet , however taking that whole concept and moving to a "private" cloud model and we are very nearly there , especially with our non production envinroment, all we are missing is the self provisioning piece. When a sandbox / dev/qa/ server is required , our users should not need to / care where that server is, if we can make it transparent enough and provide the required service levels , its of no consequence to them.

in summary , while yes there is a lot of "hype" around it , there are some usable concepts. That doesn't mean we are suddely going to dump 2000+ vm's onto the web

[Moby-Dick]

Hope this helps clear it up for you

Edit: i see that the video has already covered this...

Edit 2: That's rather good , actual lol at the matrix

my thoughts exactly

In terms of explaining the conecpt in laymans terms it is not half bad

[innovatao]

The scale of "the cloud" can be quite confusing too. Microsofts SkyDrive is a very basic example. The files exist out there in the cloud but the resources used to house the files you put on there are intangible to the frontline user utilising shared servers, storage devices and connections to bring a final finished piece of utility.

This then scales up all the way to virtualised machines hosting software and services reachable from any terminal able to parse the software used to connect to it, a web browser for example or even a more dedicated thin client.

We're using some of the basic applications/uses avalable out there, but have yet to progress to the more involved uses.