I understand why people are upset about the word. It's misused.
But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked.
Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instances. And then you can send some more requests and only get charged for a few minutes of time. When this transition happened, we called it "the cloud" because it's a big undifferentiated mass of computers. We could've called it "the soup" but we didn't.
That's what it has always meant to me. I don't understand why people want to eradicate the word just because it's misused. People misuse the word "internet" all the time, but I don't think we should strike it from our vocabulary.
And that's my biggest problem with the word, and why I go to some lengths to avoid using it when talking to clients, despite a number of my employer's (and their partners') products including 'cloud' in their actual name.
No two people actually agree on what the c-word actually means. For you it's elastic compute. For others it's cheap storage, or geographical diversity, or managed RAID, or an ersatz CDN, or their hosted email or wiki or some other application, or an accounting convenience (dipping into the opex, rather than the capex, bucket), or, of course, some combination of those and others.
The biggest problems I've dealt with in IT over the years stem from people having even slightly different ideas of what words mean -- so a word that involves wildly different understandings is not a recipe for tranquillity.
Agreed. When I read the title, I was thinking "Oh, so you'd prefer to pay for dedicated servers? What a pain!".
Though, I don't think the author is upset about the word. He's just warning against services that fall within his definition of "cloud" - which is pretty fair. Losing your stuff is no good, and there's always cruddy services out there.
Yeah, I guess you're right. Weirdly he's not talking about the cloud at all, he's just talking about storing things on someone else's servers. So I guess he's one of those people misusing the word cloud.
But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked.
Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instances. And then you can send some more requests and only get charged for a few minutes of time. When this transition happened, we called it "the cloud" because it's a big undifferentiated mass of computers. We could've called it "the soup" but we didn't.
That's what it has always meant to me. I don't understand why people want to eradicate the word just because it's misused. People misuse the word "internet" all the time, but I don't think we should strike it from our vocabulary.