The "Cloud"

Starguard

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 28, 2003
Messages
332
I have been working with many of my colleagues and I am somewhat confused as to what most people refer to as " The Cloud".

Now dont get me wrong. I know and fully understand what this is as far as networking is concerned, my question here is the title itself. Many of my superiors (I'm talking high corporate level here) all refer to the cloud as just that.. "The Cloud" and will use no other name for its description.

From former threads Ive read on this forum, I have noticed that several people here took offense at this title and felt it as being somewhat degrading or demeaning. I would like to know what YOU all refer to it as.

Please explain :cool:
 
The Cloud = The Internet. It's a simple buzzword, and a shitty one at that. Slightly more clever people rever to cloud services as essentially front ends for old hat services that have existed since day one, but it's all BS IMO.
 
The Internet lost its freshness and buzz status years ago. They needed a new term.
 
While everyone is dissing the term 'The Cloud'. Most folks best pay attention to IAAS, SAAS, PAAS, DevOps, SDN, etc. Its taking over faster than you can blink. If you dont spend time getting up to speed with services like AWS/GCE/Rackspace/Digital Ocean, automation such as Puppet/Chef, and the bull stampeding resurgence of Ruby as becoming a language of choice in administration this 'NWO' you will find yourself a dinosaur in 5 years. Yes the cloud is a fancy term for 'the internet', and 'shit thats been around forever', but, its here to stay and its only growing in multitudes. Large enterprises have taken notice and are beginning to leverage 'Hybrid Cloud' solutions. Don't be the guy who only knows Cisco/Juniper, or VMware/Hyper-V, or even just your standard MS AD/Exchange admin. You will be left bag holding wondering what happened. Yeah i know, im painting a doom and gloom, but these next couple years are a turning point in how your traditional datacenter/networking/etc physical/virtual stacks that you host and completely manage yourself are looked at.

source - traditional VCP holder who manages vmware/*nix/SAN who has had to go to conferences, self-learn, keep up with the technology inside a massive corporation trying to completely rethink its infrastructure processes with CI/CD/etc. Amazing the amount of companies ive seen also doing the same.

When i can use a framework like Heroku, and as an individual or company develop and deploy my own stacks w/o needing any "OPS guy" or "Network Guy" it pays to read up and learn up. Just a very small example.

What it means for the everyday individual internet user w/o a career in IT? Nothing. :)
 
The Cloud is storage space that exists on a computer that is somewhere other than the physical property you are accessing it from. IT can be 1000 miles away. Or at your neighbors house.
 
most commonly used now as a single word which describes a pool of resources (storage, processing-all intertwined) in a datacenter(s) somewhere. to put it simply. that's all i tell people.
 
It is the Internet. But, the big push is for putting things that you'd normally have on-site moved off-site in someone else's datacenter. You're using their resources (wherever they may be) as part of your network infrastructure. Exchange server? Rather than hosting it yourself on your rack, or colo, you're having MSFT spin up a VM with Exchange. Storage? Same thing. Any network resource. With a good WAN, your users may not even realize it's not onsite.

So, you don't have to deal with hardware maintenance, cooling, power, etc.. You're paying someone else to worry about that.
 
I see it as anything that is managed and hosted by someone else. Hosted mail, PBX etc... anything where you arn't really managing it from an admin standpoint. Now if you are renting a dedicated server or colocating and hosting it yourself even though it's on the internet I don't think it would count as cloud. But if you make a website and send the files off to someone and they take care of all the hosting then that would be cloud.

Typically these environments will consist of multiple servers but as far as you, the customer, it's just a fuzzy cloud and you don't see or know anything about it.

Personally not a fan as I like having full control over my services but big CEOs/managers and non technical people love it because they can put the liability on someone else and it's like magic to them, it just always works and never goes down and everything is perfect. Butterflies and rainbows coming out of the computers. :D
 
The Cloud is a method by which management can abdicate responsibility for complex IT funding decisions and avoid those pesky IT folks wanting to spend money on things they don't understand. Or, a way of shifting from significant CapEx to primarily OpEx.
 
The Internet lost its freshness and buzz status years ago. They needed a new term.
Haven't you heard? It's "The Internet of Things!". It's gonna be big!

Fucking bullshit marketing terms. Just like "The Cloud". "The Cloud" can easily be explained as a S.E.P. ( HHGTTG reference ): Somebody Else's Problem. That's all "The Cloud" is. However, the term is so ambiguous it could mean anything to anyone, purposefully so. It's a kind of sale's rorschach test, only instead of understanding the subject's state of mind, it's used to fleece companies out of billions of dollars by way of letting managers think it means "Magic happens here". It doesn't even mean "the internet" as that's actually *something*, it almost has no effective meaning.

I despise the term and think very poorly of folks that use it in serious conversation.
 
I have been working with many of my colleagues and I am somewhat confused as to what most people refer to as " The Cloud".

The term "The Cloud" at the executive level means "accessing a service from anywhere". It doesn't mean what tech people like us hoped it meant like a service that could span many data centers where one DC could suffer an outage and not affect the overall service. Unfortunately, that is definitely NOT what it means and places like Amazon charge you a premium for that functionality.
 
The buzzword "Cloud" can be boiled down to a simple concept, a Hosted solution. Some 3rd party is holding you data for you, and providing you access to it. Whether it's email, files, some Software-as-a-Service program, If they hold your information it's "in the cloud". Take email as an example, whether it's hosted by Google's GApps, Microsoft's Office365, or someone else, it all resides and is managed by them. The theory is that they are responsible for the Security, Reliability, and Backup/Restore of your information.
 
Basically, with the explosion and uptick of the Internet in the past 10 years, saying client-server model sounded lame. The "Cloud" is nothing more than a replacement for a multi-decade long term. Don't fall into the trap of people using it in reference to something new and magical. It's the same old thing as always with companies using it to hype up services.
 
ARGHHHH :eek:

I HATE that term... "the cloud". It makes my spine tingle and my skin crawl.

Like I tell people here at work... you're storing your info on a server sitting in a room somewhere else instead of storing your info on a server here onsite. There IS NO cloud in the way they think of it. They all think it's some magical thing out there (some even think the sky ARGGHHHHHH) where stuff goes as a backup.
 
.....I would like to know what YOU all refer to it as.

Please explain :cool:

It's someone else's servers doing the work so that your servers don't have to.

Don't have the time/skill/resources to host your own email server?? Use someone elses.
Don't have the time/skill/resources to store your files? Use someone elses.
Don't want to run a program native to your computer(or intranet)? Run a program being hosted on someone else's computer.

It's really simple.
 
a buzz word that idiots have bought hook, line and sinker..

yeah.. I'll put all of my data out there for all the world to see (.. NSA... )
 
4saken is right. If you think "The Cloud" is just another name for "The Internet" you're way off and will be at a serious disadvantage before long.
 
ARGHHHH :eek:

I HATE that term... "the cloud". It makes my spine tingle and my skin crawl.

Like I tell people here at work... you're storing your info on a server sitting in a room somewhere else instead of storing your info on a server here onsite. There IS NO cloud in the way they think of it. They all think it's some magical thing out there (some even think the sky ARGGHHHHHH) where stuff goes as a backup.

That would be a good business model, have servers on airplanes with wireless uplinks and your data is literally in the cloud. should something happen to the earth like a massive biblical flood your data will still be safe. :p
 
When people started using "cloud" several years ago I always thought that the cloud was redundant and highly available storage or computing world-wide. Only last year I found out that apparently for the majority of hosts "cloud" really means just a cluster of servers at a single datacenter. To me, that makes zero sense. Back then if you were looking for this sort of setup you would simply refer to it as a cluster. I am against the idea that cloud is a cluster of servers at a single datacenter.

The Internet is world-wide, and the illustrative idea of what a "cloud" is is that it is above -- it is "the Internet" -- or world-wide. The idea that you can go anywhere in the world and when you try to access a resource it will automatically know to communicate with the closest datacenter to get the best latency. Amazon and Google are probably a couple of the only few providers that actually does it on this level. THAT is the "cloud" my friend.
 
While everyone is dissing the term 'The Cloud'. Most folks best pay attention to IAAS, SAAS, PAAS, DevOps, SDN, etc. Its taking over faster than you can blink. If you dont spend time getting up to speed with services like AWS/GCE/Rackspace/Digital Ocean, automation such as Puppet/Chef, and the bull stampeding resurgence of Ruby as becoming a language of choice in administration this 'NWO' you will find yourself a dinosaur in 5 years. Yes the cloud is a fancy term for 'the internet', and 'shit thats been around forever', but, its here to stay and its only growing in multitudes. Large enterprises have taken notice and are beginning to leverage 'Hybrid Cloud' solutions. Don't be the guy who only knows Cisco/Juniper, or VMware/Hyper-V, or even just your standard MS AD/Exchange admin. You will be left bag holding wondering what happened. Yeah i know, im painting a doom and gloom, but these next couple years are a turning point in how your traditional datacenter/networking/etc physical/virtual stacks that you host and completely manage yourself are looked at.

source - traditional VCP holder who manages vmware/*nix/SAN who has had to go to conferences, self-learn, keep up with the technology inside a massive corporation trying to completely rethink its infrastructure processes with CI/CD/etc. Amazing the amount of companies ive seen also doing the same.

When i can use a framework like Heroku, and as an individual or company develop and deploy my own stacks w/o needing any "OPS guy" or "Network Guy" it pays to read up and learn up. Just a very small example.

What it means for the everyday individual internet user w/o a career in IT? Nothing. :)

+1 learn learn learn!
 
When people started using "cloud" several years ago I always thought that the cloud was redundant and highly available storage or computing world-wide. Only last year I found out that apparently for the majority of hosts "cloud" really means just a cluster of servers at a single datacenter. To me, that makes zero sense. Back then if you were looking for this sort of setup you would simply refer to it as a cluster. I am against the idea that cloud is a cluster of servers at a single datacenter.

The Internet is world-wide, and the illustrative idea of what a "cloud" is is that it is above -- it is "the Internet" -- or world-wide. The idea that you can go anywhere in the world and when you try to access a resource it will automatically know to communicate with the closest datacenter to get the best latency. Amazon and Google are probably a couple of the only few providers that actually does it on this level. THAT is the "cloud" my friend.

That was my same thinking, until I saw this: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/13/car-crash-triggers-amazon-power-outage/

I had assumed that one of the strong features of "cloud computing" was high availability.
 
That was my same thinking, until I saw this: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/13/car-crash-triggers-amazon-power-outage/

I had assumed that one of the strong features of "cloud computing" was high availability.

Wow don't they have like... batteries and stuff? Seems crazy they'd rely 100% on generators and not have enough battery capacity to go for at least a couple hours so they can figure something out.

But guess that's a cost... If you're hosting your own stuff you will spend the money it takes to make sure it stays up. These companies will just deal with the downtime as it's not that important to them as long as they don't loose to many clients.

This issue is also very trivial, it's odd they did not test the switch after installing it, they would have found out that it has an issue, then could restore power and troubleshoot.
 
Whenever someone says "the cloud", I think of Toy Story, where the little green alien guys in the claw game are all in awe of "THE CLAWWWWW" - it's that level of derp.
 
+1 learn learn learn!

Yup. I moved out of network and server administration into a Devops role and I find it much more challenging and rewarding in terms of engineering and architecture. It's funny to read these responses though. Gives an interesting perspective!

Back to the point at hand. The term is just that. A term used to comprise distributed information systems that are housed offsite, typically in highly available environments....AWS, Rackspace, Azure, etc. Historically, this had connotations of outsourcing hardware and reducing workload on companies who have used onsite systems. Many sys admins viewed it as the company taking the most interesting part of their jobs and giving it to someone else that arguably does not save much money.

With proper planning and coordination, you can figure out if it is suitable for your company. Sometimes it is, sometimes not. It seems like most companies serving large amounts of public facing traffic benefit from these systems.
 
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