What’s in “The Cloud”?
Posted: June 13, 2011 by Pete, Category:Environment
When I was at the airport recently, almost every billboard seemed to be hijacked by the Microsoft marketing team promoting “Azure” and CloudPower (their latest Cloud Computing tech). You’d think it was something new! So what is “The Cloud?” Well, it’s just a term which means that you handle data and software somewhere other than your computer, via the internet. All the work goes on in some servers in California, Pune, Beijing or anywhere else except your computer in front of you. A web page provides the interface for this to happen.
Why is “The Cloud” such big news?
Having other people’s servers do all the work for you from a web page has been going on for years. When the two guys who started Google launched the first version of their search engine in 1998, it was one of the first proper Cloud Computing applications. The user typed some text into a web page, which was then transferred to a few computers sitting in a little garage in Palo Alto, which crunched the search numbers and posted the results back on the same page. In 2007, just nine years later it was estimated that Google had approximately 1 million servers. Why did it get so big so fast ? Simply because they worked out the fastest way of searching the internet, and then integrated low-cost advertising when it became really popular. Advertising revenue was $30billion last year. It’s the most stratospheric rise in computing history.
What can it do for me?
Web pages for cloud computing apps have been springing up across the web for some time. Many of you get mail through Gmail. Google Docs is starting to rival Microsoft Office for personal document editing. In some ways it’s better – because it’s on The Cloud, you can work on your document with friends together, store different versions of it, and know that someone else looks after it and keeps a copy. A couple of other really neat applications are free photo editing (www.pixlr.com) and free movie editing (http://jaycut.com/). The whole approach keeps the cost of software down, and you don’t have to install it either.
