Cloud services - what are they - REALLY?
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Is it just me, or does this guy not know what he is talking about?
By the way, Glen, the article is quite amusing when one reads it in the light of all the "gray days of horrible server responsiveness" that folks like Robert have been going through. The article claims that Athena has "spoken out against delays", referring to the fact that the Stage 2 deadlines have been pushed further into the future. We can only hope that the extension will give Athena time to make their product provide a more satisfying experience for their clients.
Getting back to the question of "is it truly cloud based", all of Athena's code that I have read, when debugging their bugs, is just a bunch of JavaScript, and maybe some Java Server Pages (I don't remember, and I don't bother reading it anymore). Before the term "Cloud Services" ever got into the lexicon, we would call Athena's stuff "a web app" ... They write code that runs on their webserver that produces webpages that the user can click on, and in order to make something happen behind those clicks, the webserver has to execute yet more code, then serve other web pages back to the user, etc. etc.
That notwithstanding, even I would agree that Athena could technically call itself cloud based if its own web servers were not running on Athena hardware, but instead were running on "virtual machines" in a Cloud like Amazon AWS. But as I said in my last post, I don't know if they are doing any of that.
HIPAA-wise, they certainly could do that and still be HIPAA compliant due to AWS being "even more than just HIPAA compliant", as stated here: AWS HIPAA Compliance FAQs
Oh ya ... to respond to your wondering whether Athena could do what I proposed in my previous post (isolate at least one client onto a separate web server, to see if the response issues improve) if they were "truly cloud based", I would say that being truly cloud based would make such a task even easier. They wouldn't have to see if they had yet another "server machine" sitting around; they could just "rent" another virtual machine from Amazon AWS.
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From a cursory glance, it looks like terms slapped together. I half agree with him in paragraph 2, really hard to evaluate when taken out of context.
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OK, so what makes one thing a web app and another thing a Cloud app?
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A web app is installed and deployed onto a single server.
A cloud app, Is installed and deployed onto multiple servers in perfect sync.
Probably wrong but this is my definition. The problem I have with paragraph 2 is you can use Java script for both.
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But cloud app is just confusion city. You really need to give more detail than "It's a cloud_____"
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"Cloud" is such a freakin' buzzword now it's mostly impossible to define. And I work for a "cloud" company.
It's like people confounding what "broadband" means by defining it by speed. Broadband, as a term, came about because it uses a BROAD BAND of frequencies to transmit data, things like the higher frequencies used by ADSL that we can't hear but are transmitted over the wire.
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@PSX_Defector said:
"Cloud" is such a freakin' buzzword now it's mostly impossible to define. And I work for a "cloud" company.
It's like people confounding what "broadband" means by defining it by speed. Broadband, as a term, came about because it uses a BROAD BAND of frequencies to transmit data, things like the higher frequencies used by ADSL that we can't hear but are transmitted over the wire.
Here Here!
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A cloud service just means "hosted." 99% of the world become "cloud" once the marketing people started using that term. If it comes over the Internet, it's on "the cloud." If the guy looking at the code doesn't think that a cloud product would run JavaScript in the browser, what the heck did he think a cloud application was going to be.
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@scottalanmiller said:
A cloud service just means "hosted." 99% of the world become "cloud" once the marketing people started using that term. If it comes over the Internet, it's on "the cloud." If the guy looking at the code doesn't think that a cloud product would run JavaScript in the browser, what the heck did he think a cloud application was going to be.
Exactly!!!
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@Breffni-Potter said:
A web app is installed and deployed onto a single server.
A cloud app, Is installed and deployed onto multiple servers in perfect sync.
There isn't anything, anywhere that makes that differentiation. Cloud the marketing term (the cloud) simply refers to something hosted "over a WAN link." Cloud Computing is extremely tightly defined and is not related to either of these things at all.
Adding ideas like redundancy, reliability, multiple hosts and other things that are not related either to the cloud (Internet) or a cloud (cloud computing) is what gets people confused because they start to associate unrelated things. There is no implication whatsoever in the term cloud that anything would be redundant or use multiple anything.
Much like how SAN means essentially nothing, just block storage over a network. It doesn't imply size, speed, scale, quality, cost or anything else. A USB External Drive can be a SAN. Netgear sold $99 SANs that were worthless, just drives with Ethernet cards on them. But people keep assuming that SAN means something completely different and associating unrelated things with it - which in turn is leveraged by marketers to fool people into paying for a "SAN" or a "Cloud" that does not meet their needs at all because the end users associated things with the terms that are not implied by the terms.
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Would it not be accurate to call Netflix a cloud-app. Spotify a cloud-app?
My single server PHP/SQL based contact list?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Would it not be accurate to call Netflix a cloud-app. Spotify a cloud-app?
My single server PHP/SQL based contact list?
Sure. EVERYTHING over the Internet is a cloud app. It's a pointless term to use, but not wrong. It's not cloud computing. Netflix is both, they are cloud computing on Amazon's cloud and also over the Internet. Only things that run locally on your computer are not cloud.
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What I'm trying to say is not everything IS a cloud app. Just because it runs on the internet on someone else's server does not make it a cloud app
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@Breffni-Potter Why not? I think even your single-server PHP / SQL based contact list could be a cloud app.
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@dafyre and that's what makes the term "cloud" or "cloud app" worthless. Does it really matter if it works on the internet? OK maybe it does, but the point is really more about cloud computing.. not simply the fact that you can access it via the internet.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
What I'm trying to say is not everything IS a cloud app. Just because it runs on the internet on someone else's server does not make it a cloud app
What I'm saying is is that it IS that simple. There is absolutely nothing implied in the term cloud app to suggest the slightest bit more than that. Reading into it causes confusion. The marketing term cloud, as in "on the cloud" literally means absolutely nothing other than something running over the Internet.
Netflix is actually the best "cloud app" example possible as it is cloud by every definition that there is - both "the cloud", the marketing term, and it runs on a cloud, the technical term.
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@dafyre said:
@Breffni-Potter Why not? I think even your single-server PHP / SQL based contact list could be a cloud app.
Without a doubt, as long as it traverses a WAN link.
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@dafyre
You "could" be a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist with a collection of high powered armoured suits. I'm not saying the cloud term has not been ruined and abused by the marketing nutters. I'm just suggesting why not start to change it? -
@Dashrender said:
@dafyre and that's what makes the term "cloud" or "cloud app" worthless. Does it really matter if it works on the internet? OK maybe it does, but the point is really more about cloud computing.. not simply the fact that you can access it via the internet.
Right, there is a reason that "cloud app" is a marketing term, it is for non-technical people to say it is over the internet.
Cloud Computing is the IT term and is very, very specific and has nothing to do with the Internet.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@dafyre
You "could" be a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist with a collection of high powered armoured suits. I'm not saying the cloud term has not been ruined and abused by the marketing nutters. I'm just suggesting why not start to change it?Because there is no need for it at all. It's a redundant term. If you try to add something meaningful to something that has no meaning you simply empower marketers to mislead people. Like what has happened with SAN.
