Cloud Technology/Computing

[tbrick18]

Has anyone any experience of Cloud Computing?

I've been looking into it in more detail recently and am interested to know if anyone has done any Cloud Software development (SaaS) and if so what their experience has been like. Is it very different than say creating a .NET web application?

The IaaS side of thing seems fairly straightforward, are there any real pitfalls here? As a user, what would be the minimum broadband speed required for practical usage in this way.

I've been looking at the GoogleApps which seems like a great idea and I can see the potential of writing software in this way.
I also read that it is anticipated that by 2015 about 80% of all companies will have moved at least partially to the Cloud. Any opinions on this?


Any IT companies out there actively looking at moving to the Cloud in the main?

Sorry for the geeky topic!

[lynchbhoy]

every so often the cycle starts again.
It was distributed computing, then thin client, then power pc's holding the work locally, then back to remote computing via citrix, then we had local in house server farms and clustering which gave rise to vmware and virtualisation.

All throughout this was littered with buzz words that means we went from locally heald processing power and data to remotely held data and processing power.

Its the industrys way of keeping the wheels of consumer spending greased.
Each iteration of new version of a certain application/software needs increased computing power to run it, therefore we need to buy bigger , faster more powerful computers every 3-5 years.

Now on to saas.
Most traditionalists (non programmers) prefer to keep stuff in-house.
reasons are that despite the massive strides made in broadband/commercial WAN network speeds/security/costs of data centres - there is still an element of distrust out there.
Early adopters are either fools who have bought into the new technology and fooled by the buzzwords or they have nothing to secure with harmless data (which I cannot believe anyone has).

Its a good idea, but the motivation behind this is money - obviously.
Why go with Ms Office 365 when you already have it on your PC.
If your broadband access goes - yer fecked - you cannot work offline - this is the case for a lot of areas around Ireland - eg you wont get much work done on a train in Cork or Kerry with more coverage blackspots than working ones.
Why leave yourself wide open in terms of security -especially with hackers at an all time high ad security repeatedly being circumvented.

It is a good idea, but it is still too early for people like myself or organisations that value their data or financial information. By the time this technology is at a level where people might want to use it en masse - I reckon the next big thing and set of buzzwords will already be bandied about !

[nifan]

The term is buzzy, but it as always depends on your requirements - cost, reliability, performance and security.

The idea with the cloud for individuals for music, documents etc is easier as performance and security are less important (gmail, hotmail etc  have been remotely hosting individual and small companies data for years)