What the heck is cloud computing?

[yoursurrogategod]

Ok, super n00b question, but I've read some material on it and I still can't wrap my head around this thing.  Maybe I just need a different perspective on this thing that I never got from other sources?

 

I'm familiar with desktop and web-based development.  One has state and the other is stateless.  I've watched a tutorial on Youtube about a guy connecting to Amazon's AWS cloud computing environment, but I still don't 'get it'.  Do applications in that environment work more as web-server serving up web-pages or a server where I can write a C++ app that I can communicate with over a socket?

 

What do you actually do there to do something productive?  Say I want to analyze market data as it's coming from several sources (be it S&P 500 and NASDAQ), how would I actually go about doing it?  I'd need something that can run continuously and do things on its own and then give me some feedback on its inputs.

 

Also, to what languages am I limited?  Can I use Erlang?  Are certain providers more restrictive than others?

[trq]

The 'Cloud' is just a fancy marketing term for a remote computer. Simple as that.

[gizmola]

While I agree with thorpe, that "Cloud" is simply "internet based remote resources"  there has been a paradigm shift.  Lead by Amazon, there are a number of companies who are offering programatic access to on-demand computing resources.  Increasingly these resources don't have to be virtual computers you have to boot up, but can be computation nodes.  For example amazon offers this service:  http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/  which lets you use their web interface to launch jobs into a Hadoop cluster they maintain.  AWS has a number of services like this, with seemingly more being launched each day.  Of course you could also launch your own server cluster in EC2, which is really easy these days now that they have EBS based AMI's, and a feature that lets you create an AMI from an existing instance. 

 

You can setup an EC2 server with your software stack, save it to an AMI, and use that AMI to launch any number of cloned servers that already have your stack installed. 

 

Without a doubt Amazon is ahead of the pack, but there are "Cloud" offerings from Linode, Joyent, Rackspace and Media Temple, to name a few of the major players I'm familiar with. 

 

So in summary, yes you most certainly can develop an application in any language you would like.

[dreamwest]

haha one of my friends said it was when all the worlds information is floating around in the air up amongst the clouds - i laughed sooo damn hard

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

[Jamdenny]

"Cloud desktop computer" is one of the buzzwords being bandied about right now, and many individuals don't know what it practice. to a point, it is just a name for a craze that is occurring already, and to a point, it is just the most recent try at "narrow consumer" desktop, which has been tried several nights previously. But dissimilar beyond initiatives, Cloud desktop may be the last word "insubstantial customer".

 

 

 

[.josh]

"Cloud computing" from an average user's perspective (not a developer or company offering a service) is really more about having less actual hardware and software physically in front of them, being able to access their personal stuff (email, games, whatever) from any device anywhere, not just sitting in front of their computer at home.  Rewind the clock a couple decades when a lot of "computers" at businesses were really just dummy terminals hooked up to a single computer... that's IMO kind of where I see the future going...going back to the principles of the past, only better technology involved. 

[KevinM1]

"Cloud computing" from an average user's perspective (not a developer or company offering a service) is really more about having less actual hardware and software physically in front of them, being able to access their personal stuff (email, games, whatever) from any device anywhere, not just sitting in front of their computer at home.  Rewind the clock a couple decades when a lot of "computers" at businesses were really just dummy terminals hooked up to a single computer... that's IMO kind of where I see the future going...going back to the principles of the past, only better technology involved. 

 

Exactly.  Cloud computing is the modern equivalent of client <-> mainframe.  The difference is that we can connect wirelessly, which gives us unprecedented mobility, and the cloud/mainframe can grow/shrink according to our needs.