Mailund on the Internet

Cory Doctorow discusses the dark side of cloud computing in Not Every Cloud has a Silver Lining:

Here’s something you won’t see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

That is, of course true, but for computationally or memory intensive computing, it is probably still the way to go.  And of course, it all comes down to pricing as well.  It doesn’t matter so much that I pay per cycle used if I end up paying less than running my own computer…

Anyway, read the piece for a different view on cloud computing.

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Yesterday I was at an interesting talk at the computer science department: Virtualization will be the Operating System of the Cloud, Steffen Grarup, VMWare

Virtualization is a neat approach to cloud computing.  You bundle up your application with the OS and whatever else it needs and pack it in a VMWare virtual machine, and then it can run on any machine on the cloud.  Well, any Intel or AMD machine, I guess, I don’t know what else, but of course there are some hardware limits.  The cool thing is that the dependencies on the software on the computers “out there” – that you have very little control over – is virtually gone.

I expect there to be a lot of devils in the details – like what happens if your code depends on e.g. SSE instruction sets that are not available on all processors, or what happens if your code thinks it has two or four cores and optimises its thread usage for that, but the real hardware has fewer – but a neat idea it is.

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