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It has probably escaped no one that Amazon had several days of serious issues with its cloud hosting service last week, which took a large number of sites either fully or partly offline, including sites like Reddit, Foursquare and Quora.
These days if you try to find news involving the word “cloud,” you’re more likely to get an article about cloud computing than you are finding a weather report. If the amount of news referencing “cloud” is anything to go by, the media has embraced this new terminology with open arms, starting in 2008.
Google made a huge splash when it announced its plans for the Chrome operating system, a web-centric OS where essentially everything is run through a web browser. One great promise of Google’s Chrome OS is the arrival of low-cost, lightweight hardware, since most of the storage and other data handling is done in the cloud. Perhaps that 100-dollar computer will finally become a reality.
But there is a problem. A rather big one. The strength of the Chrome OS, that it makes maximum use of online resources, also limits its potential adoption. To have any real use of the OS you need a decent Internet connection, and that has some significant implications we need to look at.
Last week Google finally unveiled their much-talked-about Chrome OS, and subsequently worked the tech community into a frenzy. The operating system certainly lived up to Google’s initial promises of being browser-centric – it is basically just the Chrome web browser atop a custom Linux kernel.
Chrome OS is a momentous step towards making the fuzzy concepts of cloud computing more of a distinct reality. What follows are a few reasons why I think it matters, and how it will change the computing landscape by bringing us closer to the cloud than ever before.
The combination of high bandwidth and low-cost hard drives has created a small revolution in online storage. Web-based storage like DropBox, Mozy, Data Deposit Box, and Amazon S3 offer individual computer users and firms of various sizes a fast, convenient, and flexible way to store their data.
But before you or your company jump in credit card first, you should consider the following five factors before you choose an online storage solution.
Last week, Gmail failed – for the third time in recent months. Yet again, the media and blogosphere declared the end of hosted services, software-as-a-service and cloud computing as we know it.
Here’s why I disagree:
(Read on to get cloud computing expert Guy Rosen’s take on how the latest Gmail problems relate to the viability of cloud computing in general.)
How many servers does Google have? Nobody outside Google knows exactly how many servers the company has, but there have been a number of estimates through the years. One of the most quoted ones is from 2006, when it was estimated that Google had approximately 450,000 servers. And that was three years ago.
Another estimate showed up in 2007, this time from the analyst firm Gartner, estimating the number of Google servers to one million.
Considering that both these estimates are from a long time ago and Google has grown its data centers significantly since then, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Google today has at least one million servers worldwide.
Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.
From the App Engine status page:
On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.
What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.
Amazon has just launched a pretty cool service for those of its AWS customers who have large amounts of data that they want to upload to Amazon S3: AWS Import/Export. It’s essentially what used to be called a sneakernet, i.e. you can just mail your data on hard drives to Amazon via snail mail instead of sending it over the Internet.
You see them over and over again in blogs and news articles. Web buzzwords like The Cloud, Web 2.0, wiki, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, and so on. They have become part of our everyday vocabulary.
Have you ever wondered who actually came up with these words, and when? Where did they first show up?
