If you exclude all discussions about who invented what and whose name should appear near the definition of cloud computing (which is still less than an embryo), there is some pretty good threads going on over this “Cloud-Computing” group. One of my favorite is the challenges that computing “in the cloud” is bringing us.
I’m not that interested in defining “cloud computing” - there is so much discussion around the exact wording and how it compare to grid computing, SaaS, utility computing … it’s not even funny anymore. In addition to that, I’ve built my first “cloud-like” system in last January (2008), which is a big 6 months after google trend start acknowledging the word. I’m kinda late to this party.
Yet, in order to allow everyone to understand the next few posts, I’ll need to explain what it is. Do not mistake this text for a definition, its really only a very general - non technical - description of a how a cloud might appear:
a fully virtualized environment where the client control the application (sometime integrated with an operating system) and the provider offer a visualization layer over physically distributed hardware. The easiest example there is : Amazon EC2 & Enomaly.
Your application (which is a part or whole operating system) is run dynamically on computers around the world. If the computer where your code is crash, another one take the load. Your application can be migrated without you knowing it (no slow-down or interruption of services) and their infrastructure can easily evolve.
You control your application - they control the hardware. In other words, we are speaking of adding a layer of abstraction between the device driver and the application - a second operating system.
So, in a third party cloud system, we are in presence of dynamically allocated resources - you do not own - to your application. As a preview for my next posts, lets see how this might be dangerous.
Security, laws and localization of data in the cloud
This is really the issue which will be the most present in the next few years : in such services, you can’t know the exact localization of your data. Which mean you can’t know which law applies - and when.
By automatic process, your application can be migrated to another datacenter, in another country, under specific laws. Which could then allow … you to run your precious code… or…. them to read your private files.
Cloud computing based corporation still have a lot of work to defined all those variable - especially if they want to be an interesting option to corporation & government where privacy is important.
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