[ih] Geek Terminology (was Re: Resource sharing)

[Miles Fidelman]

Larry Sheldon wrote:
> On 12/23/2012 3:48 PM, John Day wrote:
>
>> Even the nebulous use of "cloud" rather than what it is a "data
>> center."  It sounds so much more reassuring that my stuff is just out
>> there in the cloud, rather stored with someone else in their data
>> center.  (Even that is a euphemism).
>
> Of late I have been wondering:  Has that term's definition morphed 
> without me noticing, or did I use it incorrectly back in the day?
>
> When I was active in networkish stuff in the late 20th century I 
> "cloud" was a device (, metaphorical) for talking about entities that 
> could communicate without much caring how the details in the cloud 
> were arranged.

My experience has been similar.  But.. it seems like "cloud" has morphed 
into simply "out there," as opposed to "on a machine I run."  The thing 
is, it's easy to talk about connectivity as being amorphous, not so much 
when it comes to computing - which leads to lots of people, mostly from 
the IT world, promoting different visions of "out there" (i.e., someone 
else is taking care of it).

We've got:
- grids (which are somewhat cloud like)
- service oriented architectures (which sound cloudlike, but very 
quickly degenerate into specific services running on specific machines)
- software as a service (sounds like timesharing to me)
- platform as a service (whatever a vendor wants to push this week)
- infrastructure as a service (which sure sounds to me like "virtual 
machines running in someone else's data center")

Now, Bill Joy's old vision of "distributed objects everywhere" sounds 
like a model for a "computing cloud" - but maybe that's just me.

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra