Is “Cloud Computing” just hype?
I’m reading up on “cloud computing” and I can’t help but wonder if it’s just marketing hype. Microsoft has devoted a considerable amount of effort in selling their Windows “Azure” platform and Amazon has been offering AWS for quite some time.
However, I don’t see how this is any different than creating a web application and hosting it on a web host like Godaddy or Discount ASP.NET. Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t see paying per transaction when all I have to do is create and host my web app on my web host.
I guess I have some more learning to do.
Advertisement
Hi Michael, great question to ask at this time.
Unfortunately, as you saw, a lot of the hype around “cloud computing”, is indeed just hype. Not that Microsoft has the right definition, but the way we look at cloud computing is that it isn’t the same as hosting.
It has more to do with a different way of designing and building software applications to work in a horizontally scalable (scale-out) model. In a nutshell it’s about writing applications to work on top of a physical environment that may consist 1-1000 (or more) small servers, compared to the traditional model of vertically scaling architectures (clustered large servers). As a result, architects need to consider different techniques such as database sharding, distributed parallel and asynchronous (event-driven) processes, shared nothing architecture, idempotency, etc. From that perspective, cloud computing enables us to build different types of applications, and the modern cloud platforms provide a lot of the distributed systems for storage, data, connectivity, security, etc.; so that we don’t have to incur the huge engineering efforts to build and operate them ourselves.
On the other hand, if we’re just looking at cloud computing simply to host a simple relational database-driven website, then yes, it isn’t all that different from hosting that web app on any web host.
Just my thoughts.
Best! -David Chou (Microsoft)
Thanks for the clarification. I have recently had the opportunity to work with a cloud of applications that have made my life a lot easier. It’s a lot more than just “an application stored on a host”.