I have been hearing this term quite a lot. I have a bunch of mini questions that I would like to ask.
I am really looking forward at the responses.
What people think of right now as cloud computing, especially the Amazon/Google/Microsoft offerings, are really just glitzy ways of abstracting traditional hosting. It's just that somehow when you say "cloud" people think it's okay to put data online that would normally have been kept in-house.
Real cloud computing would also mean your app is also distributed across the host's datacenters, such that a user on the other side of the country or even across the ocean can be served by the nearest node (as defined by whatever routing mechanism their isp uses) with no extra work on your part, and if one node goes down there are still several others handling the app.
You can do that now, but you have to set it up yourself- there's no service that will automatically "put your web site/service in the cloud" any more than you would if you just hosted a web site with Rackspace.
The closest thing currently out there is the SaleForce platform. Using that system, you don't worry about instances, memory, or database size or activity. You just build your app and salesforce worries about making it scale. If your app works and is good and people know about it you'll have paying customers, and salesforce will serve them the data no matter where they are. That fact that the users must subscribe to salesforce is just a business model issue and isn't relevant to the technology involved.
1) They've been using it for years, so I'm thinking yeah.
2) They have web browsers, so yeah.
3) O yes my brothers.
4) The vogue for the term, where it's used like it has some kind of cosmic significance that "Web 2.0" and "software as a service" didn't, is definitely overdone and will fizzle, and it really can't happen too soon.
5) Assuming what you've been doing is use the best methods you can find to accomplish what you need to get done, nothing.
Yes, I think that businesses are ready for cloud computing, or could become ready very quickly (in terms of infrastructure). Businesses are always ready to save money and carry less risk, so assuming the business model works out for customers of a cloud, then I expect that we'll see more and more businesses transitioning to this way of working.
Consumers certainly do have the resources. Anyone who has used Amazon, for example, has used a cloud service (they've "productized" the cloud they were using internally and made it available for public use as well). Anyone who has used the K9 web filter has used a cloud service. They're more prevalent than most people realize, and for the most part are intended to be rather transparent.
I see a mixed potential for resilience against attacks. Being "in the cloud" almost by definition means that to shut down a service there are many more points of contact that would have to be taken out (strength in numbers). On the other hand, there are potentially more points of entry into a system, which could mean more potential for attack.
Cloud computing is probably here to stay, due to its inherent flexibility and the ability to implement the underlying infrastructure using fairly inexpensive components. The hardest part to get right is the software that runs the whole thing, but there are companies out there who are already doing it well.
As a developer, I recommend watching the publicly available cloud resources (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.) to see what commonalities there are and to see how the market share ends up shaking out (to determine what your focus might be). As far as I know, they all provide APIs and documentation to make use of their clouds as simple as possible, so start with reading up on what's out there.
I hope this helps!
From my understanding of cloud computing (which is barely anything at the present time), I don't think there's an awful lot of differences between the "cloud" and the way a lot of us do things already - we request data from a service provider, that provider gives us the information which may be stored in disparate resources around the internet or it may be hosted on their own servers, we don't care. All we care is that we requested data, and they give it to us... like a Google search, who really knows what goes on behind the closed doors of Google except their design and development team.
There are some useful applications of this cloud notion though, the relationship between SO and Gravitar and OpenID for your avatars and login to StackOverflow. Disparate resources on the internet all functioning together to give a cohesive product.
There's also the storage mechanism that you can subscribe to with your iPhone (for those of us that have the iPhone) - it allows all your data and files to sit out there somewhere on the internet and when you need access to it your iPhone tells Apple that you want your file and miraculously that file appears on your iPhone.
So there are applications of cloud usage out there today that are being used. How useful I would consider that depends on how I could conceivably write software to leverage that. There are many useful applications for this.
Is the technology more prone to attacks? Well like any technology, if you don't take the necessary steps to secure it, then sure. It depends on the architecture of your cloud.
In answer to those that think it's just the latest buzz word, there are many useful applications of this technology that will leverage it. Whether that becomes mainstream is another question.
As a developer, you really need to evaluate whether this approach is useful for the project you're on and can be leveraged effectively - just like any other technology. If it is useful and can leverage it effectively, then use it. If you can't, then don't.
The short answer is "The cloud computing is here to stay" That is definitely an all know answer.
Are business really ready for cloud computing?
Business and continues businesses need to be agile and adapt to technology, principally if they main focus is technology. That those not mean every business is ready, but their success will probably mean getting ready.
* Do consumers have the appropriate resources to consume services from the cloud?
Many people are consuming services from the cloud long ago. Any of the google and yahoo services are being consume by the consumer. Cloud computing puts all the power into normal developers and business people.
* Is this technology prone to more attacks?
As any new technology, it will be a curve of no attacks (is new) then you will get some attacks and people getting profit defending from those "bad people". I don't think this particular technology will be prone to more, is just until in balance.
* Some think cloud computing is just another over hyped term thats going to fizzle out. True?
This is probably true. At some point you will just not know that you are using it, because the great next thing will be on top of it.
* As a developer what different do I need to do?
If a biologist find a new specie, then 1000s of biologists around the work have plenty to do. They need to run all the studies ran in other spices, found all there special things. The same happens here. You see it, take your specialization, and apply it here. It could turn out to be pretty good for you, at least in knowledge for the future.
I hope this is helpful.
Check out this blog post by Matt Cutts. He ran some software to monitor how much of his time is spent using various software applications. He found that he spent 96% of his time in a browser. His conclusion was
When 96% of your computer time is spent in a browser, that’s living in the cloud.
Matt Cutts is not exactly typical -- he works for Google -- but still, he's an interesting data point.
I work for Salesforce.com and we also have what we call a "cloud computing" platform called Force.com aimed at data-centric business applications. But I think in general you can't get too caught up in the terminology. The real trends out there are people moving to the web as an application deployment model (i.e. software as a service) - this has been going on for a while, but what we're seeing is that people are also looking to the more progressive players in that space (like Google and us) to give them more than just hardware. They're looking for these players to help them build applications quicker by relying on a bunch of building blocks and services that offload more of the low-level stuff and enable developers to focus on the important parts of their applications. Just my two cents.
I have always had my own opinion about what cloud computing means and I don't know if it would be considered "right", but considering other buzzwords like "Web 2.0", it could be a pretty broad subject. In my opinion it is the idea that all your information would be available over any device, in an intuitive way. So you wouldn't feel tied to once PC or device because your experience would be carried from place to place via the internet.
Is Cloud Computing really here? I say no, because from my personal experience I feel like i'm tied down to data on my PC and my phone. I don't feel like when moving from device to device that it knows me. And while there are ways to achieve this effect, there seems to be no industry stadard and things just seem messy.
Are business really ready for cloud computing? I'm no business man at all, but I am willing to bet that businesses are not really ready for this, I doubt most CEO's even understand the concept fully, at least the ones that are not in the hardware/software industry.
Do consumers have the appropriate resources to consume services from the cloud? I don't think so because like I mentioned there is no standard, and things are messy, and a lot of the consumers are not tech savvy I would guess.
Is this technology prone to more attacks? Probably because of the widespread distribution of personal data that comes with it.
Some think cloud computing is just another over hyped term thats going to fizzle out. True? False. Well, for the most part, the buzz surrounding it may die after it becomes more common. In my opinion I think its an awesome concept that just needs to be implemented correctly.
As a developer what different do I need to do? I am probably not qualified to answer this question ;-). I would think a single developer wouldn't need to change, but collaborate with others to build the proper frame work for this concept to really come true. I think this can only become a reality from he industry wide point of view.
I think Cloud is evolving to not necessarily mean deployed to a public infrastructure. Private clouds are gaining traction, just as intranets followed the internet.
A big difference "Cloud" can bring is the management of resources. Having the ability to treat a large volume of commodity based hardware as a single, or reduced set of entities, as well as having facilities to move these resources to where they are needed much more easily, to get better utilization. Today's traditional VM's can be lacking in that area. The process to move large numbers of machines from one computing need to another can be tedious.
There is also the concept of automated failover, so that work performed is not lost during a hardware failure.