Ask twenty different computer scientists what cloud computing is, and you’ll get twenty different answers. This isn’t because cloud computing as a concept is still in its infancy; the technology is already up and running and the chances are you’ve already used it. It’s because cloud computing offers so many possibilities and options in its implementation, that those twenty computer scientists that you asked see twenty different ways of using the technology. In reality they’re all talking about the same thing. So don’t panic. In it’s simplest form, if you’ve ever used BitTorrent, that’s cloud computing. If you’ve ever participated in SETI@home, the hunt for extra terrestrial radio signals, that’s cloud computing.
So what exactly is the cloud? The cloud is an abstract way of describing a collective number of computers that are being used to serve a specific need simultaneously. The number of participating computers can be scaled up or down to suit that need. But crucially, the cloud is neither physically owned nor operated by the user. The cloud is only available through an internet connection. The difference between BitTorrent and SETI@home is that with Bit Torrent (if all you’re doing is downloading) you’re using the cloud to get what you want, while with SETI@home you are part of the cloud, serving SETI@home’s needs. But those are the simplest examples. cloud computing has moved on significantly since those baby steps, and its impact on business has been nothing short of a revolution.
Most people are aware of the impact that BitTorrent has had on the entertainment industry. The easy distribution of copyrighted movies, television shows, and music led to a large decline in sales. However, this challenge led directly to the creation of highly successful legal alternatives such as iTunes. However, what most people aren’t aware of is that this first foray into cloud computing demonstrated the viability of the technology, which led to cloud computing fast becoming a genuine industry in and of itself. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 services, and Rackspace’s Mosso are two key examples. Amazon’s EC2 offers commercial clouds of processing power while Mosso offers clouds of storage power that allow new Internet companies to begin operation without that company owning a single server. For example Livestream is completely serverless. The company focuses purely on its content and customer relationship management, while its servers and other technical aspects of its business are rented as a metered utility, like electricity or water. In fact, cloud computing has quickly become synonymous with utility computing.
As a utility there are currently several layers to cloud computing, but they generally fall under three main areas: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), of which Amazon and Mosso are two examples, providing processing and storage capacity. Software as a Service (SaaS), of which peer to peer BitTorrent is an example, but which has expanded significantly with other web applications such as the online word processing capabilities of Google Docs and the social networking site, Facebook. And then there is Platform as a Service (PaaS), which again, like cloud computing itself, has not settled on a definitive description. The idea behind PaaS is that the operating system or development kit used to deliver applications is cloud-based and accessible via a Web browser without the need to install anything on the computer you’re accessing it from. Two examples of PaaS are AppEngine from Google and WaveMaker, the visual development studio hosted on Amazon EC2.
All ground breaking stuff. But there are consequences of cloud computing to ponder. The geopolitical consequences of services, applications, platforms, processing, and storage becoming essentially without borders has yet to be fully gasped. Which national laws would apply to an application written by six people in six different countries on a development kit spread over a cloud of thirty more countries, processed by cloud computing spread over thirty more countries? Don’t worry, no one else has the answer either.
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