wonderboy1953
In Runtime
- Messages
- 195
Can someone explain what cloud computing is about (which I've been hearing about in the past few months)?
Cloud computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Its like the electricity and binary that makes a computer or network function. I think..
Cloud computing is the idea that you can store stuff 'out on the cloud' so for instance Google docs is cloud technology. You are storing .docx and .pdf's on their servers (so ultimately their HDD's) somewere in one of their data centers. The whole idea of cloud computing is the idea of outsourcing physical storage. The advantages are that, say your computer crashes and you loose a document you were working on because you had not saved it. They are trying to make it so your word editing software is streamed from the net. With cloud computing (the software that would stream from the net) it wouldn't have been lost. You would boot back up your computer and bam, it would still be there on the remote server you were working off. The disadvantages however is that there are people that would try to hack those servers and if they were successful would have a wide range to files that are not theirs.
One massive advantage to cloud computing is that it would eliminate the need for high end hardware and reduce the cost of computers in general. On the other hand though it does rely strongly on your bandwidth, if you have slow internet then you have slow everything with cloud computing. Other things it could be used for is, music (amazon just brought this out) and gaming.
Hope that helped.
If you look at something like Google Docs you will see where Cloud Computing is heading. It's more than data storage, the applications actually execute "in the cloud". It's somewhat similar to what the mainframe model is where all you have on your end is a dumb terminal, the OS, applications and data all exist only "in the cloud" and all your end does is enter data and display the results.
Are you suggesting that applications can execute faster "in the cloud" or execute in there whereas they wouldn't execute on a home computer?