Myths on "CLOUD COMPUTING"

The concept of the cloud has come to be associated with many things that actually aren’t the cloud, although they are closely connected to it. Let’s walk through some cloud definitions that can be potentially misleading, such as:

• “The cloud is just search engines and e-commerce sites.” Sure, the cloud is often associated with Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! and e-commerce sites such Amazon. But these services pre-date today’s “cloud hype,” and we’ve been searching online for decades.

• “The cloud is a bunch of huge data centers located somewhere in the distance.” The leading players in Internet search are investing in enormous data centers, which summons up images of grid or matrix computing. But big data centers have been around for nearly 50 years.

• “The cloud is anything on the Internet, in a world of its own.” The cloud is sometimes seen as an Internetonly world that lives in its own space, in isolation from all the companies and individuals who use it every day. But we can access the Internet from our televisions, computers, cell phones, and cars, so the Internet is already everywhere.

• “The cloud is a reference to virtualized resources.” Virtualization is a term that is commonly associated with the cloud. There is a view that “if it’s in a virtual machine (VM), it’s in the cloud.” But then, some companies run very large private virtualized data centers that are not connected to the public Internet in any way.

• “The cloud is services.” Now this gets really confusing, because there are so many types of services associated with the cloud and the Internet. These include software-as-a-service (SaaS), storage as a service, and applications as a service, along with consulting services (uTest, mTurk), financial services (online banking), and even food services (remember WebVan?)

• “The cloud is network compute clusters.” These would-be high-performance compute clusters that deliver massive amounts of computing power over the Internet are often associated with references to the cloud, or grid computing systems.

While all of these concepts are closely associated with the cloud, none of them actually is the cloud. So let’s look at terms that come closer to describing the cloud in accurate terms in the next post. (Source:- www.hp.com)