Cloud Computing is a buzz word that’s been chucked around a lot on the Web 2.0 world recently, and with the announcement yesterday of Windows Azure, a cloud-based operating system developed by Microsoft, I thought I’d give myself more of an insight as to what this means.
It isn’t really a new concept, just like AJAX was never a new concept, it’s just when people realise things can be used in a certain way, it gets popular real fast. Basically, the concept of clouds is providing an abstraction layer, and normally a physical seperation between several nodes, for example cloud storage (Amazon SimpleDB, Google BigTable), cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2) and cloud services (Google Checkout). In fact, you’ve probably already used cloud computing without even realising it… Google Maps and Google Docs are a couple of examples. Google, as you might have guessed, are pushing forward with the cloud computing bits quite a lot, and the only other real competitor in my eyes is Amazon, especially their hugely popular EC2 and S3 services.
It’s a pretty cool concept though – instead of having a laptop with 10GHz processors and 1TB of RAM and all that, we’ll all be using Eee PC with just Firefox running, most likely connected to Google. The concept of that forces buying hardware into the providers hands – the companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. and all we do is use the services. I’ve not really gone into too much detail about what it is, but one of the advantages of this whole thing is that you don’t have to worry about data storage, and you can access your stuff anywhere you want.
The big thing holding UK back from diving headfirst into this cloud computing stuff is the fact that most residential UK internet connections suck. We’re still using ADSL and cable broadband for christs sake. And unreliable at that. Despite Virgin Media having a 35% market share, and BT Broadband having 40%, I still hear endless complaints about them. At the end of the day, even 24meg just doesn’t cut it (although in reality, I’ve rarely seen someone actually get anywhere near the potential throughput of a 24meg connection, due to contention ratios and all that). We need Fibre to the Home, and we need it with low contention ratio – we need Gigabit internet (or maybe 40 gigabit anyone?). The problem with that is that no-one wants to foot the £28.8 billion bill. I digress, that’s a different story…
