Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Cloud Computing

While trying to look ahead and see what is coming next, I keep running into a term that I am not sure everyone understands. That term is "Cloud Computing" and I think we are going to be hearing that term more and more.

In order to understand Cloud Computing, let's set the framework for the current model of computing. Think about the way you typically work today. You sit down to your computer, open a file in your documents folder with an application installed on said computer and create a piece of work. If you want to do something different, you open another application on your computer or install another application on your computer to give you more capability. Eventually your computer runs out of memory, storage, processing power or whatever and needs to be replaced with a new more powerful system.

Cloud Computing is different. It refers to the use of multiple networked computers (the cloud) as the primary resource for the computing tasks. That could mean that the software, storage and processing resides on some computers other than your own. Perhaps the most commonly recognizable example of this is our own campus webmail. By using your browser, you access your email but all of the work is being done by the servers on the other side. The sorting, sending, even storage exists on a collection of servers managing your mail, scanning for viruses and spam and more. You no longer need to have an email application on your computer and you no longer need to store email on your computer.

That's a very simple example but there are many more. Some of you may have been to a website called HouseCall which is a site for free virus scanning online. This replaces (to a limited degree) the application installed on your computer that scans for viruses. GoogleApps is an excellent example of Cloud Computing which competes with Microsoft Office in which word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software as well as document storage is handled online. Even YouTube is an example. With YouTube I can capture video, convert it, and play it. I used to have to install iMovie, Sorrenson Video and QuickTime to do all of that.

If this sounds a little familiar to some of the older or more savvy computer users, that's because it is not new. In fact cloud computing is, essentially, network computing or grid computing. Those that remember the days of dumb terminals might have already picked up on that. To paraphrase Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer and that which sits on our desktop becomes little more than a widow into it.

While each example I have given requires a computer running a web browser, other methods could be used to access cloud computing but this is just an introduction. Over the coming weeks, I'll talk and write in detail about more. In the mean time, see if you can spot some examples of Cloud Computing and post them as comments to this article.
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