Cloud computing - in your dreams
Summary: A particularly odd bit of goofiness has hit the infosphere: cloud/utility computing mania. Nick Carr has written a book.
A particularly odd bit of goofiness has hit the infosphere: cloud/utility computing mania. Nick Carr has written a book. IBM has announced, for the umpteenth time, a variation on utility computing, now called cloud computing. Somebody at Sun is claiming they'll get rid of all their data centers by 2015.
R-i-i-i-ght.
You know the flying car in your garage? The syllogism is:
- Google-style web-scale computing is really cheap
- Networks are cheap and getting cheaper fast
- Therefore we're going to use really cheap computing over really cheap networks Real Soon Now
Can you spot the fallacies?
Fallacy #1: Google is Magick The world's largest Internet advertising agency does have the cheapest compute cycles and storage (see my StorageMojo article Killing With Kindness: Death By Big Iron for a comparison of Yahoo and Google's computing costs). But they do nothing that the average enterprise data center couldn't do if active cluster storage were productized.
Google built their infrastructure because they couldn't buy it. They couldn't buy it because no one had built it. But all Google did was package up ideas that academics had been working on, sometimes for decades. Google even hired many of the researchers to build the production systems. Happy multi-millionaire academics!
Blame vendor marketing myopia for missing that opportunity. But their eyes are wide open now. If your enterprise wants cluster computes or storage you can buy it. From Dell.
Fallacy #2: Networks are cheap Or they will be Real Soon Now.
10 Mbit Ethernet from Intel, DEC and Xerox came out in 1983. A mere 25 years later we have 1000x Ethernet - 10 GigE - starting down the cost curve.
About the same time a first generation 5 MB Seagate disk cost $800. Today a 200,000x disk - 1 TB - costs 300 vastly cheaper dollars.
Also in 1983 the "hot box" - a VAX 11-780 - with a 5 MHz 32-bit processor and a honking 13.3 MByte/sec internal bus cost $150,000. Today a 64-bit, 3 GHz quad-core server - with specs too fabulous to compare - is $1300. Call it 1,000,000x.
Networks are the bottleneck, not the solution. Hey, Cisco! Get the lead out!
What's really going on? There are - currently - economies of scale, which Google is exploiting and MSN and Yahoo! aren't. So the latter two are going out of business.
But when you look at the cost of going across the network compared to the rest of infrastructure you realize that local - what we used to call distributed - computing is the only way to go.
Ergo, cloud computing will remain in the clouds and real computing will remain local. Where you can kick the hardware and savor fan hum and blue LEDs.
Sure, some low data rate apps - like searching - can move to the web. But if you want a lot of data and you want it now, keep your processor close and your data closer.
Comments welcome, as always.
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Talkback
Someone has some sanity left I see
Yup ....
Since I do custome programming and BUSINESS oriented software, most of my client base (100 Million a year in sales and less) are not interested in and have expressed NO interest in CLOUD type applications. Most of them in the Accounting end of applications do not even want a WEB based application and client/server seems to be such a PAIN to them.
LOL - What would be NEAT for them would be some sort of TERMINAL emulator that could do GRAPHICS and be cross platform, and pretty MUCH all of them have said if such a beast existed they would use it ...
History will not be kind to those that gamble that Cloud Computing
RE: Cloud computing - in your dreams
1) Google processes about 20 petabytes of data per day
2) Amazon has created a unique eco-system around cloud computing that is changing the SMB landscape.
3) IBM has dedicated over 200 programmers to their Blue Cloud 2008 initiative.
4) Universities around the globe are creating course ciriclum around the uses of MapReduce.
5) Rackspace/Mosso seem to be doing pretty well in the clouds.
I guess we will have to check back this time next year to see who was right.
johnmwillis.com
For web services - sure
But for enterprise and personal computing the costs of running I/O across the
network are just too high. Their problem is the lack of scalable commodity
products - particularly in storage.
I feel another post coming on.
Robin
Still, the capacity of the internet is going up exponentially at the same
We offer articles online 24x7, but people still like downloading a copy
Still, the costs are going down, and the reliability is going up. It is
And, LANs may not have gotten much faster, but that was never the bottleneck, the capacity of the Internet has grown exponentially, and will continue to grow exponentially.
But, you points are well taken, it will take some time. But, those sitting on their hands right now waiting for cloud computing to catch on before doing anything will not be treated kindly by mother economics.
You left out the most important reason.
When cloud computing is considered in future, the topic will be why people in the press allowed themselves to be persuaded that internet computing was significant. The chapter heading will be: Deluded hopes to reduce Microsoft dominance.
And, how much per user does it cost Google to offer email compared to
You're discussing the customer.
You're Google. You have to obtain $ billions in profit each year to make a significant effort worthwhile. What's your plan for web applications?
And, what it costs the customer does not matter??? And, Google does NOT
"Cloud Computing" is nothing but a high tech perpetual motion machine
Cloud computing is not necessarily equal to central control. We are talking
And, there will be multiple providers of cloud based applications, just as there are multiple vendors of desktop applications, so, there is no more control than with desktop applications.
And, you can create you own cloud application using Amazon.
With cloud computing, we will be free, not controlled!!!
You must be reading the demo brochure.
Yeah right. Just like there are quite a few cable news channels and they all deliver the same bunk. But that is what I was talking about. It is still the data.
I don't want to create any application. Just use them and deploy them.
Any time you give up for perceived convenience, you give up control. I bet they said the same thing during the October Revolution only to have Stalin bump them off a few years later.
Also forgot to mention privacy were the gumbmint will rifle thru you data to help keep us safe.
But do keep us entertained with your naivety.
They may restrict which cloud applications you can use in the enterprise,
On the consumer side, you will be completely free to choose your cloud applications just like you choose your desktop applications right now. You will also be able to create your own little mashup applications as well.
What happened at IBM 20 years ago is completely different.
Not talking about the enterprise.
Yes you will and they will all suck. That is because rich applications will suck all of the bandwidth out and only simple less convenient applications will only be able to run. You say bandwidth will improve but this will benefit distributed computing also so people will not move toward it. As for creating mashups, it is only a GUI trick that allows you to add function buttons to the same program using up the same CPU cycles. The masses are really not programmers nor are they interested.
Not really. IBM is a main player of open source and it is a trick to lure us into the services trap so they can re-screw us all over again. They are just using OSS as the tool to get us onto their expensive packages and this old fart can see them for what they truly are. Anyone that believes differenty is a salesman or a youngster. Koolaid must be grape flavored today.
Still, the cost saving of centralized computing are so HUGE that they can
There will be just as many if not more choices for cloud computing as there are now for legacy desktop applications. There will be no central control except at the enterprise, and the enterprise is already forcing central control for legacy desktop applications. No difference due to the cloud model.
That isn't true. Centralized computing is more expensive.
No there will not. I know that any graphics applications will not work due to enormous bandwidth requirements. There will be central control if you let others do it for you. At work this is a good thing to control data that belongs to the company. For Joe retail this is not a good thing for any web service will tell him to go to hell if there are snafus. Just like the cell phone industry.
You really ought to quit pushing the cloud for this idea should have died a long time ago. The cost will be too high and the service will be lousy. Tell your masters to drop dead for this SOB is onto them.
So, in your world, you do not need a network connection if you use Windows