Where Do We Begin...?

As the 'About My Blog', on the sidebar says, there is a lot of buzz about "Cloud Computing", but what is it really?. What does it mean to you right where you are right now? What I hope to do is start from some simple descriptions and current ideas of what it is and build from there. You will learn, as I have that, this thing called cloud computing is very dynamic. It changes with every twist and turn of new ideas, company marketing plans and concerns about security and usability. This just makes it all the more interesting on our journey to seeing how it affects each and everyone of us.

Here is how Wikipedia starts out describing cloud computing: "Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." Now some of your heads just started to spin with that description, right?

Let's go back to some more basic questions that some of us have. Like, "why is it called the cloud"? Back in the day, anytime we were talking about communications going outside our own network, we referred to it as "the cloud". When we were making drawings of our network, we would actually draw a cloud to represent that unknown place where our signal or communication would go to, to get to where we wanted it to go. Here is a good example (again from wikipedia):


That unknown place today is in someone's data center out on the internet. The development of computing today reminds me of the really old days when everything you did computer wise, went from your dumb terminal to a a behemoth computer in the IT department. No I'm not old enough to have experienced that in business, but I did see one on a field trip. On a 5th Grade field trip to the University of Illinois, we walk up to a room with a glass front. In this room are a bunch of people in lab smocks,pocket protectors and all, walking around the room lined with cabinets with what looked like really big reel to reel tape decks. My buddy, John Hollingsworth says, "man, that's what I want to be when I grow up." Of course, I ask him, and what is that? He replied,"those are mathematicians!" We were both in awe and had no idea that this big room would have less computing power than the laptops we are on now. An interesting side note is that many years later, I was traveling through the University of Illinois campus and started to offhandedly point out the building I saw my first computer in when I saw the sign over the door. The sign read "Supercomputing Intstitute".

The difference today from then is that rather than that one big computer, there are multiple servers, many now virtualized (more on this later), switches, routers, and connections that make up what we now call the cloud.

Not wanting to complicate things too much with this first post, we will say that cloud computing is a way to have access to other computing resources without personally maintaining the infrastructure to access those resources. As stated in the sidebar, I hope to progress along in the descriptions of cloud computing to the point that there is something here for anyone interested. So hold onto your seats and come back often for the next steps...