"data-as-an-answer"

Is 2009 the year of "x-as-a-y"? Is this phrase going to be this year's "x 2.0"? For the love of god, must we leverage this going forward?

pfft.

Data-Hostage-As-A-Service

Extortion-As-A-Service

Pay-Up-Or-Be-Shut-Down-As-A-Service

Got-You-By-Balls-As-A-Service

Sure I'll participate -- IF they in turn buy my new:

FYOU-As-A-Service

Kiss-My-Ass-A-Service

Bite-Me-As-A-Service

Stuffit-As-A-Service

"Does this concept apply to a corporate data center? Absolutely. Internal clouds will come to fruition as companies uncomfortable with the security or offsite nature of internet clouds start to figure out ways to achieve a high - if not infinite - level of scale internally. And considering that commodity hardware is cheap and often under-utilized, the cost basis won't necessarily be higher than running full-time on EC2."

You do realize that companies have been doing this very thing since the 1950s, right?

"While it's not realistic to build your own Amazon infrastructure - nor would you want to unless you are trying to directly compete"

DUH!

But if you want to prove that cloud computing is REALLY a good idea, why not build an infrastructure that Amazon, or Google, or whoever, would prefer over their own hand-rolled systems. Do you honestly think it can be done? I personally believe it can't be done ... In-house is ALWAYS cheaper.

" - it will become possible to build and deploy internal clouds just as you would server clusters. You'll likely even interact with the internal cloud through APIs just as you would the external clouds."

::rolls eyes:: Aren't we doing this already?

Are you sure you understand how corporate computing works?

Any node on the net, that's part of the cloud.

Outsourcing all your data storage and applications, is just crazzeeee. No one will do it, not completely.

The cloud is an accessory, or a required element to the business, but it goes local then to live, and only that which needs to on the net directly accessible is sent to the remote server cluster of the cloud.

It is too big of a security risk to run everything on the cloud, can you imagine any medium to large company doing that, it is just going to industrial espionage ahoy. Small companies will use the cloud more, but even there they will download and clear at key points.

I think the cloud is more useful for flash events, extra redundancy etc etc, and there it will be used, I can imagine shopping centres using it, stadiums, night clubs etc etc places where always on is not required and the data is meant to be public, that's the irony.

"Cloud computing" sounds a lot like "Grid computing" which was being touted in the late 1990s as the next great paradigm in computing.

It seems to me that most of the over-hyped predictions made by Grid pundits never came to pass, but at least they understood the need for shared APIs to ensure interoperability.

Cloud computing = grid computing minus interoperability = dead duck.

Cloud computing, what a right load of old cods! Honestly, this is the same cack that has been trolled out year after year. "Soon you will be living your entire life connected! Nothing simpler! No lose ends! Your life will be simpler when you simple 'pull on a string' to locate anything to want anywhere in the system!".

I seem to remember some naff article from the ideal home expo circa 1950-odd where they stated that you would order you groceries through the telephone, no need to shop. Well we sort have it, but not really. Another example of something that did come to pass but 50 years later and not really the same thing, useful but not really the same as the thing it actually attempted to replace.

Cloud computing is just another nice little buzz word invented by mindless gonks in ad-agencies to give brain-dead, middle-management new buzzwords to jack-off over in their weekly meetings with each other.

Give it another 6 months and we'll have new buzzword to fill page after page of tripe with.

Reg, just stop, please? For the love of sanity, you're above this sort of thing.

The "cloud droplets" idea is known as distributed computing, popularized by SETI@home about ten years ago. There's not much difference between "internal clouds" and regular virtual machines. Maybe make the entire server room into a meta-VM that dynamically allocates resources to VMs it creates and manages. And most people would call Gmail 'webmail', not some 'service-as-a-service'. (For people who use the pop/imap server, it's not even webmail, just another email account.)

Including journalists and authors, confuse 'premise' with 'premises'?

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/premise

Let's get it right people

"Including journalists and authors, confuse 'premise' with 'premises'?"

I tried answering this once before, seems it got lost in the aether ... ANYway, the authors and journalists probably do know the difference. Their editors, on the other hand ...

BTW, anyone know if anyone survived the 130 below sandstorms in Scotland?