Cloud services - what are they - REALLY?
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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.
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Before it was called "cloud" it was called "hosted" or just "over the Internet." The term "cloud app" is always redundant with terms that were heavily in use and meaningful by the mid-1990s.
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At NTG, one day we were a "hosted application vendor", circa 1999. Then one day in the mid-2000s it turned out that overnight we had become an established, mature, long term SaaS cloud vendor.
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Maybe it's just my inner rebel, refusing to bow down to marketing
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@Breffni-Potter If I makes you feel any better, I tend to refer to stuff hosted on a web site somewhere as web apps instead of cloud apps. 8-)
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Maybe it's just my inner rebel, refusing to bow down to marketing
All you have to do is ignore the term or learn to hear "hosted" and marketing looses all of its power. The marketing only works when people associated more with the term than exists.
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You can't, but assuming you could redefine cloud to something else, what would you even want to be associated with the term? What do we currently lack a term for?
