[info] [silk] Future is CLOUDy

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "J. Andrew Rogers" <andrew at ceruleansystems.com> -----

From: "J. Andrew Rogers" <andrew at ceruleansystems.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:45:11 -0800
To: silklist at lists.hserus.net
Subject: Re: [silk] Future is CLOUDy
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.915)
Reply-To: silklist at lists.hserus.net


Some random thoughts about the article:

- There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the big data aggregators  
are doing data mining against potential competitors, markets, and  
individuals that they are specifically interested in, including the  
use of nominally non-public data that sits on their systems.  The  
assumption that the aggregated non-public data will never be used  
against your own interests is not well-founded, any more than it is  
when discussing the same issue and governments.

- The use of MySQL is based in fanboi-ism, not rational technology  
selection.  Google is as prone to this as any other tech  
organization.  Unfortunately, MySQL has almost no redeeming qualities  
these days so I would not characterize it as a particularly wise  
choice.  And hacking RDBMS to run on these types of distributed  
infrastructures has already been done many times; Google's  
contributions to MySQL seem to be centered on defect lash-ups and  
missing basics, not cloud computing.

- Cringely pretty conclusively demonstrates in the article that he has  
no idea what "cloud computing" actually is, what you can and cannot do  
with it, or why it is important.  Messy transaction theoretic and  
latency issues do not magically disappear when Google implements yet  
another compute cloud.

- None of the various compute cloud technologies exploit the cross- 
sectional bandwidth or contextual statistics of the back-end, instead  
opting to use more of hosting model plus transparent process  
migration.  This substantially weakens the value proposition, but it  
is also understandable since they are using data representation  
technology poorly suited for the task.  The compute cloud won't be  
anything more than glorified hosting until someone addresses this  
issue, and whoever does will clean house because at that point "cloud  
computing" will offer broad new capabilities currently unavailable.


For now, cloud computing will have to compete with easy-to-use  
dedicated server environments since the argument is purely economic.   
If the argument becomes one of technological capability -- and it will  
soon -- then cloud computing will take over the world because you will  
not be able to compete without it.

As a roundabout introduction, I have a venture that has very advanced  
cloud computing technologies at its core and so this is a topic near  
and dear to my heart. :-)

Cheers,

J. Andrew Rogers


----- End forwarded message -----
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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