get your cloud off of me
Jul. 15th, 2009 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOne of the current buzzwords is "cloud computing". Strip this of its gee-whiz technological fuzz, and as far as I can tell it means, "keeping your programs and files on the Internet instead of on your own computer."
This can have some advantages for access and as backup in case your disk drive fails, I can see that. It's not for me, though; not so long as Internet connectivity is as primitive as it currently is. Just about every afternoon about 3, my DSL goes spotty for a couple of hours and hangs for several minutes at a time. (Has this been diagnosed? Of course not.) And on Monday evening, our modem went on the fritz. (Actually it was the power supply, but since I only had the one it didn't make much difference.) Couldn't do anything until the morning, and couldn't get a replacement to arrive until the morning after that.
I can survive e-mail silence that long, or go use webmail on the short sessions allowed on a public computer if I have to, but to have been cut off from home access to my Mythcon paper just as I'm finishing it up - no. Instead, I could go on writing, in fact better than ever because I couldn't surf the web instead.
So that's all done.
This can have some advantages for access and as backup in case your disk drive fails, I can see that. It's not for me, though; not so long as Internet connectivity is as primitive as it currently is. Just about every afternoon about 3, my DSL goes spotty for a couple of hours and hangs for several minutes at a time. (Has this been diagnosed? Of course not.) And on Monday evening, our modem went on the fritz. (Actually it was the power supply, but since I only had the one it didn't make much difference.) Couldn't do anything until the morning, and couldn't get a replacement to arrive until the morning after that.
I can survive e-mail silence that long, or go use webmail on the short sessions allowed on a public computer if I have to, but to have been cut off from home access to my Mythcon paper just as I'm finishing it up - no. Instead, I could go on writing, in fact better than ever because I couldn't surf the web instead.
So that's all done.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 05:53 am (UTC)resources as needed via the Internet, rather than having to own computers that often sit around and do nothing.
So if I had a website about Michael Jackson, in theory I could set it up so that before a few weeks ago, my own server could handle all the requests, but when he died and the requests multiplied a thousand-fold, I could clone my site onto a cloud server and create 100 identical websites
temporarily to handle the load. And I'd only pay for the 100 'computers'
for a couple of weeks until all the interest died down, instead of having
to out and buy real machines (or suffer having my site unreachable) only to see those machines sit idle once the hullabaloo died down.