Cloud computing was featured prominently in tech news this week, thanks to the announcement of Microsoft’s Azure, their long awaited response to Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.
If you’re new to the concept of cloud computing, here’s a great, high level overview of Azure from Webmonkey.com:
Azure is a web-based, scalable hosting environment for applications. Developers can build apps using one of Microsoft’s popular desktop coding tools, then deploy them to the Windows Azure platform, where they can be accessed by any computer or internet-connected mobile device. Microsoft supplies the storage, database server, identity management and processing power. As the demand for a particular app or service grows, the amount of resources dedicated to it can be increased or decreased on dynamically, stretching like a virtual elastic band.
I’ve written about the benefits of the cloud, and even speculated on why Microsoft should be diving in head first. However, despite all the apparent benefits, there is a small but growing movement cautioning against the cloud — and I find myself increasingly agreeing with them.
In an interview with The Guardian, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, says that “cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.”
My reasons, however, differ slightly. While the cost of implementing and operating a web application that will scale to millions of users instantly as needed can be prohibitively expensive for small to medium sized companies, cloud computing makes sense for them right now – today. But what about tomorrow?
Engineering innovations (such as the memristor and plasmonic nanolithography to name a few) promise to deliver quantum leaps forward in CPU power, data storage and network speeds. It’s a matter of time before we will all have the power of Google’s massive data centers available in the heel of our shoes. The term “insufficient disk space” simply will not exist in tomorrow’s vocabulary, just as punch card driven mainframes do not exist in today’s. Hardware and operating infrastructure will be completely abstracted, and we’ll be able to focus on what really matters – developing that killer app for the iHeel.
Filed under: Cloud Computing , Cloud Computing
