Head in the Clouds
Published in the Bangkok Post (PDF), 28 Dec 2009
Back in the dim and distant past of the emergent global computing paradigm there was something called the 'Network Computer'. This was the trade name for a computer created by an alliance of Oracle, Sun Microsystems and IBM. The idea was to manufacture diskless computers that would hook into local and wide area networks. The vision was to do away with fat client desktops with expensive components in favour of 'thin client' machines that were inexpensive and easy to manufacture. This new dawn of computing would allow access to software from the network. That was way back in the distant late 1990's! The network computer didn't take off for a number of reasons - rapidly falling hardware costs at that time effectively making traditional desktops more and more economical, the very slow speeds of Internet access (a proposed location of the applications the Network Computer would run) as well as immaturity of other available software.
Fast forward 10 years. The Internet is ubiquitous. We've seen boom-times and bad times in the fast moving dotcom world. Social networking, globalised e-commerce and Web 2.0 have been born and spread rapidly as methods of communication or technology platforms in the advancing so-called information society. Businesses, organisations, government and citizens all working in and through the Internet. Always on devices, low cost computing, smart phones and other emerging wired technologies have become commonplace at home, work and play. The moment of the network computer may have come again, this time the paradigm has been named 'Cloud Computing'... Ready for take off?
Evolution
The arrival of new web development technologies and services have evolved at a time of great change in the economics of storage space, processing power and network speeds. The costs of storage space reduce at a faster pace than Moore's Law expands for computer processing power (Moore's Law states the doubling of processing power every 14 months). The expansion of the Internet and the computers that run it have effectively created a global networked machine or distributed computer, and the speed of this emerging colossus can be measured in terms of petabytes and petaflops. Google server farms, or 'Information Factories' are strategically located next to power stations due to the need for huge amounts of cheap electricity. These distributed computer systems have given birth to a wide range of web services and applications. At first it was email and the ability to communicate remotely, then e-commerce and the ability to search and buy products online, next electronic banking and other types of finance and online business methods. Rapidly, as bandwidth and broadband has spread and alongside the explosion of computing power and storage space we have seen the emergence of a new paradigm in the way we access, use and store our personal and business information. The newly minted way of describing this reality is to talk of 'The Cloud' or 'Cloud Computing', a neat and cute way of symbolising the spread of our data from localised storage and processing capabilities outwards into the expanding network and distributed data centres that now circle the globe within the framework of the Internet, with information in perpetual flow via satelittle and high speed optical cable at near-light speeds in and through our world.
Of course our friends at Google would be inevitably be at the epicentre of our new cloud-based lifestyle. Google Mail or 'Gmail' was the first to spread, then Google Docs, then the Google Account. Each of these interrelated and indispensable services allow us to communicate and do business at any time of the day or night, as long as there is Internet access, allowing us to tap into our docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, emails, videos, databases and more. There's no more losing files, crashed computers and disappearing photos. It's all in The Cloud. Turn on, log in, use data.. The key capability of sharing documents and resources and new collaborative working practices are the killer features of these new services. The Google data centres have now expanded to include mapping and satellite data (Google Earth), books (Google Books), mobile computing (Android) and soon to arrive Google Chrome operating system. Via Android on mobile phones and Chrome OS on netbooks Google seems likely to be first past the post in offering a network computer for the broadband age. Chrome OS netbooks will have no disk drives or hard drives, no software installations. Just connectivity to the network via LAN or WiFi and we're off and running, everything accessed via the browser. In the words of Eric Schmidt one time chief technical officer at Sun Microsystems and now CEO of Google Inc., "When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network."
Emerging Industry
It's not just Google who now operate in this new dimension. Amazon now offer their own web services that incorporate storage capabilities, re-sizable computing capacity, online data centres, merchant services, and distributed relational databases. Super sci-fi product terminology pulls us towards this fascinating world: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Virtual Private cloud, On-Demand Workforce, Amazon CloudFront. Just as we may have been entranced by new terminology in the days of steel mills, ship building and railway expansion we see the arrival of bright new terms and shining product names which emblazon our new cloud-based infrastructure and product line. Amazon have leveraged their vast data centres - originally built to house the ever expanding online collections of products that they sell - into a new breed of online services. Resources we can all tap into and utilise for our business and personal needs. Have a good idea for a new web-based service, product or organisation? Want to migrate your entire technology infrastructure into the cloud? Talk to Amazon.
What Do You Want to Build Today?
The new Cloud model of computing has split into several distinct sectors each allowing a variety of tailored services. Infrastructure-as-a-service, Software-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service. The services field is now a fast-growing industry with the many established and newly arrived players busy developing a vast array of new products and capabilities. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Yahoo, Rackspace and Zoho among the current industry leaders. The most popular area is of course software-as-a-service. Users, organisations and businesses can now access all of the conventional office applications online as well as providing the safe and secure online storage of documents and other files. We can create documents, databases and spreadsheets, archive and share photos and files as well as use a range of productivity tools to streamline our workloads. Add the ability to share and collaborate on documents and files in real time within professional user interfaces then we have the beginning of a truly new model of online working, sharing and playing. Online collaboration offers the chance to simultaneously work on single documents, editing in real-time with multiple users and owners - capabilities which allow individuals and organisations a powerful new way of working and dealing with their business.
Google Apps - www.google.com/apps
The big brother of popular mainstream cloud applications. Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, email and more.
ZOHO - www.zoho.com
A comprehensive suite of online web applications from word processing to spreadsheets, wikis to presentations, databases to customer management.
Dabble - www.dabbledb.com
Online databases and information analysis. Create your own relational databases and frontends online, analyse and chart data. Create reports collaborate and share.
Amazon - aws.amazon.com
Infrastructure and outsourcing as well as databases, payment and merchant services.