Cloud Computing and the Future of the Cloud
Donal Lynch BSC
Computing Science Department
Griffith College Dublin
In this document I will be reviewing two documents published by IEEE on the topic of Cloud Computing, in an attempt to getting a better understanding of Cloud Computing and the future of Computing on the Cloud.
The topic is curently very much discussed in the computing industry as there are both very strong arguments for, and against this particular programming paradigm, which symbolises an industry shift from the traditional mainframe/ client/server architures.
Literature Review
The Cloud Is The Computer
By Paul McFedries
Publisher: IEEE
Publish Date: August 2008
This paper can be summarised with the following quote from Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos;
”You don’t generate your own electricity. Why generate your own computing?” — Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon [1].
Right from the start of this paper it is clear that the author is in favour of the inevitable shift towards cloud computing which he feels we have been on the verge of, for quite some time.
Since the 1980s and the dawn of the PC, or the personnal computer, almost every man, woman and child has at least one computer or laptop which they use for work or indeed for “boredom browsing”, an activity which has become the norm in this data driven era that we are in.
Devices such as mobile phones, smart phones, PDA’s and games consoles (to mention just a few) are capable of delivering massive amounts of data over wireless technology, and the advent of cloud computing will enable these devices to be as lightweight as possible in terms of resource requirements, as every service which they provide can simply be requested for by the device, computed on the cloud, and the results delivered and displayed on the device.
The Cloud Paradigm in this example will massively reduce the cost of devices, as resource requirements are reduced to a bare minimum due to the fact that the devices are no longer required to “compute” anything as all processing [the majority of] now takes place on the cloud.
The author also feels that we are entering “the age of pervasive computing , when computation and information are ubiquitous and always available” [2].
Many companies are now spending millions on building up massive “server farms”, which are basically networked computers, numbering in the thousands, which share their resources and perform the bulk of computing on the cloud.
He also mentions that companies already encorporating the cloud paradigm such as Google, Amazon, YouTube and a host of others, now rely solely on their massive server farms to power the services which we all use on a daily basis and take for granted.
Without the cloud paradigm, do you really think Google could return 6 million search matches in 0.2 seconds, consistently?
I think not. And for these reasons I too am in favour of the shift, towards a more cloudy future…
How Facebook Could Make Cloud Computing Better
By Sarah Rosen
Publisher: IEEE
Publish Date: July 2010
The author of this paper is similarly in favor of the cloud computing shift, but she seems a lot more interested in the social aspects of the paradigm and in the possibility of a social cloud, “which would facilitate the sharing of information, hardware, and services by using the computing resources of a person’s online network friends.” [3].
According to research conducted by Computer scientists at Victoria University, in New Zealand; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany; and Cardiff University, in the United Kingdom and at the Cloud 2010 conference in Miami on 5 July this year, it was concluded that “existing friendships on social media sites like Facebook could provide a reliable framework for long-term, regulated resource sharing. ”[4].
An intriguing conceptual social cloud is also discussed along with “volunteer computing,” which is a method of pooling resources and resource sharing anong existing “friends” on services such as Facebook, which could potentially lead to an extremely cloud based future based on friendships, that would actively see the cloud expand and contract based on real world relationships.
However, reminds the author, there are still many issues and concerns regarding this type of social cloud computing, as many of the online “friendships” which we all have so many of, rarely reflect real life trusting relationships. And a cloudier future will also be a riskier future for the end users, who entrust all of their personnal information to the cloud with absolutely no guarantees as to who exactly is storing their data, or where their data is being stored.
Conclusion
Having read these two papers I now have a much clearer understanding of both the pro’s, and the cons of future developments in the area of Cloud Computing.
The first author talked a lot about the pros, the abundance of lightweight cloud based devices, and indeed the advantages of resource sharing, both hardware and software.
He also gave an excellent analogy of the server farms currently being used by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon Clouds, on whom we have already come to rely.
The second author was a bit more down to earth, in the respect that not only did she agree with the first author that the future is indeed the cloud, but she also mentioned the not so beneficial aspects of cloud computing such as security and privacy concerns, and other pitfalls which could potentially see the cloud evaporating into a haze of regret.
In recent years with the advent of services such as BEBO, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter it is clear that social networking has managed to become integrated into our lives as society seems to have become obsessed with publicly documenting their every social interaction.
With such an abundance of web based services that seem to have captured the very essence of real world social interactivity and networking, let us not forget as we browse into the future, that every cloud, has a silver lining…
REFERENCES
[1] The Cloud Is The Computer, By Paul McFedries, IEEE, August 2008.
[2] The Cloud Is The Computer, By Paul McFedries, IEEE, August 2008.
[3] How Facebook Could Make Cloud Computing Better, By Sarah Rosen, IEEE, July 2010.
[4] How Facebook Could Make Cloud Computing Better, By Sarah Rosen, IEEE, July 2010.
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