Talk:Cloud computing/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

mention office suites

There should be a mention here about online office suites : they being examples of cloud computing Sanjiv swarup (talk) 01:17, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I would agree with that. The Register

provides a good reference. Lester 21:18, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

ty for your inputs. have done the needful Sanjiv swarup (talk) 04:35, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Introductory sub section

The foll. line is meaningless.

Common visualizations of a cloud computing approach include, but should not be considered to be limited by, the following:

I request someone to dele this line .

Sanjiv swarup (talk) 09:51, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

deleted Sanjiv swarup (talk) 03:15, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

WTF?

The first sentence of the article conveys no meaning or significance or reason. What?--Shtove (talk) 21:54, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the rest of the article doesn't do much to explain the topic, either. I'd like to slap this with an expert-subject tag, because cleanup and clarification cannot take place if the subject matter is unintelligible in the first place. I'd like to remove the spam tag, since the references seem to point to decent sources, and the external links has its own tag. Any objections to this? Wouter de Groot (talk) 13:38, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Given it is currently a marketing term, why not focus not on defining what it is -that is too vague- but in the growth of the term? SteveLoughran (talk) 21:25, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

100% agreed. Fixed now. samj (talk) 08:44, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

rename to read as "see also"

wrt sub section = Additional Cloud Topics

suggestion = rename to read as "see also"

from Sanjiv swarup (talk) 08:58, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

done. samj (talk) 09:38, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

SETI@home/Folding@home/etc.?

After reading through this article, I feel more confused than before regarding Cloud Computing. Since "Cloud" measn the general internet, so does distributed computing projects like SETI@home and Folding@home belong to the concept of Cloud Computing? As I understand from the article, they are basically raw computing power coming from the cloud to solve a problem, so are they cloud computing or not? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ufopedia (talk • contribs) 08:44, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Added per your suggestion - it doesn't matter whether the computing is done on a grid, by the neighbour's screensaver or a room full of monkeys... that abstraction is one of the fundamental features of cloud computing. samj (talk) 09:16, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Cloud services

The mention of Amazon here seems to be advertising. There are at least a thousand other such Vendors. The author of this para should simply insert a DMOZ link here for a lit of such vendors.

Disagree - I do not believer there are thousands of computing clouds available at this time. See "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds" from BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm

Disagree as well, Amazon is one of the archetypes in cloud computing as well as a very early leader. Amazon is regarded as one of the companies (along with Google) to illustrate and execute cloud computing's potential.

Disagree as well. Anyone can expose a web service. It takes security, scalability, support, billing, etc. to make is a real cloud service.

For the record

( section copied from User talk:CliffC )

rv collection of unhelpful edits, sorry if anything good was lost - spam, damaged paragraph, removal of apparently valid links, tag indicating work underway but no work undertaken

• How were my edits unhelpful? They were accurate and well referenced, unlike the rest of the article which is a regurgitation of some random paper which differs substantially from what the industry and its analysts have to say.
• Why are you apologising on my behalf, or making edits that would result in anything good [being] lost?
• What was spam?
• What paragraph was damaged (I had added a new paragraph)
• What 'apparently valid' link was removed (except for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers, a term referenced once by a paper over a decade old which is likely to be deleted soon and which has very little to do with the topic?
• How do you determine no work undertaken when the tag had just been added and should not be removed unless there have been no edits for several days per Template:Underconstruction?

samj (talk) 06:07, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually I was just thinking that these edits may indeed seem out of context with the rest of the article. There has been much discussion on this topic recently, and I have spent the last few days working on a consensus definition which you can read about here: The Cloud and Cloud Computing consensus definition?. Maybe you can read through this, and the references at the bottom as well as the Forrester and Gartner reports if you are really interested in this topic.

samj (talk) 06:36, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Samj. Before I made the reverts with the edit summary you mention above, I reverted two edits by your account (the diff here shows the before and after of my revert). I should have left an edit summary, but my reasoning was that your edits added an apparent promotional link to ebizq.net. Promotional links violate WP:EL. In addition the link is to a blog, also against WP:EL, unless the author is notable.

Next, the collection of edits I reverted with the edit summary you mention (diff here), edits made by you and several other editors, seemed intertwined and not worth reverting separately.

"...spam, damaged paragraph, removal of apparently valid links, tag indicating work underway but no work undertaken"

• spam - the misplaced link to gridbus.org has the appearance of spam bacause it was inserted in the wrong place. May not be spam, but the paper linked may not be a WP:RS either. I didn't bother to read it because of the link placement.
• damaged paragraph - IMO at that moment replacing the lead sentences

Cloud computing is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. Resources being accessed which are typically owned and operated by a third-party provider on a consolidated basis in datacenter locations

with

Cloud computing refers to computing resources being accessed which are typically owned and operated by a third-party provider on a consolidated basis in Data Center locations.

- appeared to damage the paragraph, that assessment was perhaps incorrect and simply a matter of editing style/taste. Perhaps I had become impatient with the number of edits over the past weeks that seem to come from someone with something to sell. But I did use the phrase "sorry if anything good was lost", and I do apologize for this one.

• removal of apparently valid links - links to cloud articles in businessweek.com and infoworld.com
• tag indicating work underway but no work undertaken - tag {{underconstruction}} added to article with the summary "article's a mess - needs an overhaul" by an editor with zero edits in the past except for three AfD votes for his favorite singer and musical group. Without a contribution to the article this looks more like vandalism than a constructive edit. I have no objection to the tag (which may be argued against by the article's regular editors), only to its source.

I have too much going on in the non-wiki world to read and comment on the consensus document at your web site, but I encourage you to mention it on the talk page so that you have a chance at a true consensus. --CliffC (talk) 20:07, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Ok makes more sense now. I have hundreds of edits spanning back to 2005 and a bunch of others with SPAs so maybe I was logged out or you checked while the history was catching up to my recent rename (from an alias to my full name). In any case the existing article was based entirely on a (non-notable?) paper written by a lab working on grid computing and was quite detached from reality. As I have some time on my hands I've spent the last days trying to align the two. samj (talk) 08:43, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Alright so now the article has been completely overhauled and properly referenced (per complaints made about it) it's pretty clear that my edits weren't spam so I'm archiving this. samj (talk) 08:37, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Vague and confusing

This article can be written better than it is now.Chmyr (talk) 02:13, 12 April 2008 (UTC

Agreed, this article reads like some boring, nasal nerd who's trying to impress you with jargon instead of getting actual points across. I think many readers are going to walk away from this article still having no clue whatsoever what the general term of "cloud computing" is referring to. Once we cut through the hype, jargon and nerdgos... maybe we can actually have people leave this article with some understanding of it? Is that too much to ask? LOL

When it comes down to it, it's a fairly simply concept (not the implementation and all the derivatives, but the CONCEPT itself). Typically, it's using the power of multiple computers across the internet to work in unison (or you could say in harmony) to accomplish tasks that require a lot of processing power and storage that would otherwise overwhelm the capabilities of an average computer working alone. There, I said it. LOL Cowicide (talk) 00:34, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I believe the article can be more simpler than what it is. The concept of Cloud computing loses it track at the bottom...

Dhoomady (talk) 11:01, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Chmyr and Cowicide This article needs some attention to meet wikipedia standards. Kalivd (talk) 14:14, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

This page makes no sense at all. In fact, the picture of "The Cloud" with the corresponding caption summarizes this article perfectly, much ado about hot air.

So well put and simply stated above by Chmyr and Cowicide . I run an IT Knowledge Solutions company and am still amazed how complicated our profession make concepts sound to the not technical person. Lets get over it and help people move into this new age. Thank you for clearing this up for me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.69.34.229 (talk) 10:59, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I am planning on archiving this sub section. no action : all talk !! Sanjiv swarup (talk) 09:14, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

There is no point in archiving a discussion just because there has been no action. Please don't. --CliffC (talk) 12:24, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree with previous authors, this article is misleading and has lots of erraneous statements. It's been written by incompetent people. I wish it wouldn't exist at all. I can't give all of my arguments here, because of unusual discussion format (Just a single note: Enomalism is not a cloud, but little piece of python code). We have an extended discussion on the definition of cloud at groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing If you have arguments against, let's do it in proper environemnt. Sapenov (talk) 03:04, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

i think it would be nice if there could be an article or something within Wikipedia that would match the standards of wikipedia.Anoopnair2050 (talk) 15:16, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I've spent the last days overhauling the article and I hope you are all more satisfied with it now. Feel free to contribute yourself. samj (talk) 08:51, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Etymology

I assume there is some metaphor behind the use of the word "cloud" for "cloud computing" - does anyone know it? -- 13:52, 9 October 2007 (UTC) I believe the "cloud" refers to the abstract concept of the web or internet. It's used to indicate that you don't really care about the details, about who or what is out there in the cloud, it's just the cloud, the rest of the internet.--Bill.albing 15:59, 9 October 2007 (UTC) I believe that cloud refers to the fact that most tech architects use a drawing of a cloud when discussing the Internet or services available over IP. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.145.142 (talk) 01:16, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Surely they draw it as a cloud because of the metaphor, it's not called a cloud simply because it just happens to be drawn as one. User:Jamie Kitson —Preceding comment was added at 08:49, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

See http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_7124839 Westwind273 17:41, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

No, the cloud came way before 'Cloud Computing'...its the general purpose "some kind of network stuff" symbol used when you did diagrams using a tool like visio; stick the cloud between some boxes to imply the internet was between them. What's changed is that people are now putting storage and computation into that cloud, at least in their slideware. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveLoughran (talk • contribs) 09:32, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, The Cloud has been around for ages on network diagrams etc. and while it is a metaphor for the Internet, the most important point is the more stuff you can push into the cloud the less you have to take care of yourself (consider the complexity of a WAN vs a VPN... and a diagram of both... usually the latter is the same as the former, only with a dirty big cloud covering over most of the complexity which is outsourced to the ISPs). samj (talk) 08:55, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Technical jargons

This is all very confusing. I think we need to have a clear difference b/w Cloud computing, grid computing, clustering, multi-tenant, software as a service etc... Some times these terms are self contradictory.?--Mailtoram —Preceding comment was added at 09:28, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree and have spent the last days improving the situation (multitenancy is a key characteristic of cloud computing and SaaS a subset), but there could still afford to be some clarity in terms of differentiating the other terms (esp grid/clustering). samj (talk) 09:10, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Argh

Argh I cant believe people are using this term!—Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.28.155.207 (talk • contribs)

It seems that this is the last Marketing fad (and Marketing does creates new words especially in the computing world), and as WP is just the image of the real world, I believe we should use this terme too. This not a problem in my opinion, as if the concept settles on an other term we'll just have to do a renaming (a Redirect). This is how WP works --Kompere (talk) 14:53, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually I think cloud computing has a good deal more potential than that as an umbrella term for all the other *aaS guff... I'd certainly much rather see us talking about cloud computing than bolting as a service onto everything. The question now is more about whether the vendors manage to derail it as they did grid computing... samj (talk) 08:53, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like an updated version of the 1960's service bureau. I would like to see a comparison. talk (talk) 11:00, 1 August 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.58.152.238 (talk)

I've added a link to the service bureau article per your feedback. samj (talk) 08:43, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Dell

Removed content from unreliable blog source:

While the general term "Cloud" had been used prior, the technology firm Dell has been attributed with coining the actual term "Cloud Computing." The term was reportedly first used by Dell in a press release on March 27, 2007. At this time, Dell had already begun the formal process of trademarking the term. Howeverm, in 2008, as the trademarking process came to a close, Dell found itself being largely criticized by the internet community for trademarking what many believed to be Public Domain term.

Sorry, I didn't think that a news article from the Wall Street Journal was considered an "unreliable blog source". Nonetheless, I removed the reference and tried to make the statement about Dell's trademark more neutral and factual. Updated reference includes government database entry on the trade mark. The press release by Dell has also been referenced. I do not believe the reference to the pertenent press release consitutes "Conflict of interest" as defined by Wikipedia.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.222.228.201 (talk) 13:53, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

The 'WSJ blog' is an opinion piece which has been repeatedly taken apart in the comments. Your unverifiable edits claim that Dell 'popularized' the term and according to IP2Location you are around 10mi from Dell. samj (talk) 19:30, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Here's the edits as they were at the time of removal. It's not a controversy btw. samj (talk) 19:34, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

== Term Controversy ==

While the general term "Cloud" had been used prior, the technology firm Dell has staked claim to popularizing the actual term "Cloud Computing." Dell filed for a trademark on the term on March 23, 2007 and used the term with the indicator "TM" in a press release dated March 27, 2007 .

In mid-2008, however, objections were raised to Dell's intention to trademark the term. Many in the internet community contended that the term entered the vernacular before Dell filed for the trademark, and that the term should be public domain.

The veracicty of these statements has not been substantiated. Google Trends shows 0 hits on the term "Cloud Computing" prior to 3rd quarter of 2007 indicating minimal use of the term prior to that time. There are however, sporadic news articles containing the term "Cloud Computing" dating back to 2004

Regardless, the trademark case history shows that the Notice of Allowance furnished to Dell by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on July 8th, 2008 was rescinded on August 5, 2008, and the case was returned to an examiner on August 6th, 2008.

Warned user 69.222.228.201 (talk) about WP:COI and WP:3RR. samj (talk) 19:35, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Hey Sam, Anonymous user (John) here. Just wanted to write you a message, though I'm not sure this is the correct place.

You'll have to forgive me, I don't edit Wikipedia that much and the piece on cloud computing was my first real attempt to do so. I just wanted to let you know that the piece I wrote on Dell's attempt to trademark the term Cloud Computing was a good faith effort. I'm not sure about IP2Location, but I tried their "Free Demo" and you are correct, it lists my IP address in Plano, Tx. Why that is, I have no idea. I'm sitting at a desk in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin in the office building of a machining company. I was researching cloud computing for our IT department. I assure you, I do not work for Dell.

I have to admit though, I had laughed pretty hard at the situation, and honestly, I appreciate your zealous protection of Wikipedia's integrity. I understand the internet is a crazy place, and if you don't believe me and you think I'm a malicious employee working for Dell, well, there's not much I can do. Don't worry, I don't blame you.

As for my edit, there were two things I wanted to apologize for.

1.) I was unaware of the general Wikipedia comments with regards to WSJ's opinion section. I'll refrain from referencing it in the future.

2.) I think I worded the article wrong. I state that Dell "staked claim to popularizing the term." Perhaps it would be better to say "Dell has claimed responsibility for popularizing the term" or "Dell has claimed that they were responsible for popularizing the term"

In either case, you should know that I did not mean to imply Dell actually popularized it. Proving that would be impossible, I was merely stating their "claim" is they coined the term, and that they have Trademark rights to ir. I tried to show support for both sides of the argument. Dell's side by providing Google trend results with regards to the search volume of the term measured against a timeline, and the opposing side by providing news sources to the contrary.

As for evidence of the existence an overall controversy, I have to say I disagree with you. Looking across forums and blogs, everything from Slashdot to lowlevel basement bloggers, I have found people arguing back and forth about Dell's attempt to Trademark the term and whether or not it is public domain. I believe that such discourse deserves mention on the wikipedia article, although, perhaps I am going about it the wrong way. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction? Let me know what you think!

PS - I probably won't edit anymore from work. I looked up the history of this IP, and it shows this IP made various velociraptor related vandalism edits (Wtf?). I have no idea. The first edit I ever made was with regards to helicopter anti-torque pedals and now this Cloud Computing article.

I'll message you when I'm on my home machine.

69.222.228.201 (talk) 21:27, 7 August 2008 (UTC)John

Thanks for taking the time to write John. You can (and should) create an account if you want to keep some privacy and build up a reputation (using bare IPs starts you on the wrong foot and you don't even need to give an email if you don't want to - once you have an account people can't see your IP). Apologies for the false accusation too - you must admit that it is very convenient that of the entire planet and 4 billion IP numbers you should have landed on Dell's doorstep!

So basically your writing is good but you need to use reliable sources - the more reliable the better. You can read the policy docs (eg WP:5P) but once you've got the basics down continue to be WP:BOLD in contributing where you can.

The Dell issue, while interesting (you can read more about it here), is essentially a dead duck now so far as I can tell - USPTO will declare it generic and it will be a footnote in history. I don't have a problem with Dell but I don't see that they've given anything to the cloud computing community, or maybe they have and I just haven't found it yet, and in any case it sounds like they will eventually. It is quite clear though that they pulled the term from the public domain and tried to monopolise at least part of it starting back in March last year. They've then let it build up steam where they could have been enforcing it since March as a common law mark - they were already overtly using it!

I would suggest a concise overview belongs in the legal or history section on the cloud computing page and/or the dell and USPTO pages:samj (talk) 23:29, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Sam - I understand your point. I think its very valid and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. To be honest I was already thinking similarly after the second revision. I started thinking, "I must really be on the wrong track here."

Thanks for the pointers. I'll be sure to make an account in the coming days. Have a great night! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.223.206.174 (talk) 02:57, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Introduction

The introduction in this article is poor. When I open this page I want to know what the heck cloud computing is, I'm not interested in some etymological deliberation of the origins of the word. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.89.0.118 (talk) 23:19, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Hopefully you are happier with the introduction now. samj (talk) 09:17, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

The improvements are appreciated, but I think the initial paragraph remains too reliant on technical buzzwords for a general-use encyclopedia. E.g, consider the simpler ZDNet definition [1]. Not only is it more approachable, but also gives the specific example of Google Apps. The casual reader should not have to look up several unfamiliar hotlinked terms to get the initial concept. The technical detail can be retained but the initial paragraph should be restructured similar to the 2nd ZDNet definition. That way casual readers can quickly grasp the concept, yet those with deeper more technical interest can read further. Joema (talk) 16:48, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok I've included the apps example, "in the cloud", etc. but this 'dumbing down' is not necessarily accurate... for example cloud computing is not restricted to applications running 'in or from network servers' (eg peer-to-peer, unless you're calling the other clients 'network servers'), and where is the application running anyway when the vast majority of the action is in javascript sent to the browser (eg Google Apps)? Anyway we're getting there now - it's a lot better than it was. samj (talk) 06:20, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

The very first sentence in this article is hard to read (I also believe it is off-topic):

The term Cloud Computing derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet or IP availability, using an illustration of a cloud.

The article should begin with an accepted definition of 'Cloud Computing'. As it stands, the rest of the article is as vague as the topic itself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.167.185.18 (talk) 12:36, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

yes!The article should really begin with accepted defination as the defination mentioned in the article is imprecise(indistinct) and hard to read. Anoopnair2050 (talk) 15:19, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

(Hopefully) fixed now. samj (talk) 09:18, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Similar Meanings

There are getting to be so many terms in this area that have similar meanings. I think it would be nice if there could be an article or something within Wikipedia that would straighten all this out, like a comparison chart. Terms I'm thinking of are cloud computing, grid computing, ASP, thin client, RIA, distributed computing, cluster computing, and time-share (from the 60's). For example, what is the difference between cloud computing and ASP? They seem remarkably similar. Also, I get the feeling there is some difference between Cloud Computing as described in this article, and Cloud Computing as described by Google and IBM in their initiative announcement. See http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_7124839 and http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/138195/google_ibm_promote_cloud_computing.html and http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns100807-story02.html Westwind273 18:17, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Agreed .

There could be a redirect from articles ( cloud computing, grid computing, ASP, thin client, RIA, distributed computing, cluster computing, and time-share ) to ONE article called xzzee (suggestons welcome) Sanjiv swarup (talk) 09:15, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Disagreed.

Distributed Computing is the general problem of having more than one box talk to each other. Clustering is something you do on a single site; what this 'cloud computing' story says is that you dont have your own cluster; you have a storage somewhere, CPU elsewhere. Now, Grid Computing and Cloud computing are similarish; though by virtue of superior vagueness, Cloud Computing is a superset of Grid Computing. Grid Computing has taken on specific meanings, often specific architectural meanings (OGSI/GGF grid architectures) which don't hold for Cloud Computing. Which is probalby why press/marketing like the term. I have a presentation on the topic [[2]], which looks at some of the differences. SteveLoughran (talk) 11:48, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Further...

Grid computing refers to a method for establishing your computing resources. Grid is not necessarily defined to cloud. Someone can build their own grid computer and not make the resource available over IP. Cloud refers to accessing computing resources, whether they are grid or not, over the Internet. Don't overcomplicate it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.145.142 (talk) 01:22, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

The New York Times has an article talking about the confusion http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E180025742400363509.html?ref=technology --Westwind273 (talk) 22:55, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Having talked to a number of people in industry and academia, the consensus was that cloud computing was congruent to a subclass of grid computing (indeed, it's probably the most interesting subclass where the resources are not bound to a single organization). Thus, in many ways it is possible to view cloud computing as a rebranding of grid computing to sell it to a new group of people without some of the built-up baggage of stuff that people hated about the way grids had become. As it is, in my view the whole term-space is still very new and could do with shaking out for another few years before a truly encyclopædic article on the area can be written. Donal Fellows (talk) 15:43, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

That makes sense. Grid had got bogged down in implementation details, with a lot of focus on standardisation of WS-* based APIs for talking to stuff. Cloud Computing steps back from the details by ignoring them and avoiding the standardisation process. However, I'm not sure about 'subclass'. If you use google mail to keep your inbox, you've moved from a LAN-hosted mail server to the cloud; Now certainly in a utility computing world you could host your stuff 'on a grid', but the main focus for grid work since about 2001 onwards has been batch data processing and computation, with a focus on scientific/engineering apps rather than interactivity. It's Grid Computing that has painted itself into a corner. SteveLoughran (talk) 12:12, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

The Wikipedia articles on Cloud Computing and Application Service Provider give remarkably similar definitions. For someone who knew little about these subjects, I think they would be confused by these two articles. Why have two names for what is essentially the same thing? --Westwind273 (talk) 22:19, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, there is a lot of confusion, particularly around grid computing which was originally intended as the computer equivalent of the electricity grid. Unfortunately that vision was never realised and grid became another word for cluster. While there is an unfortunate tendency to focus on virtualization, grids, etc. the real promise is more abstract and it matters not whether the calculations are done by a grid, peer-to-peer, or by an army of monkeys with typewriters, so long as it's fast, cheap and secure. It concerns me greatly that (particularly computer hardware) vendors who are tired of selling rebadged clusters as grids are now interested in selling rebadged grids as 'private clouds', and I hope that the last days I have spent editing the cloud computing article(s) help to clear the situation up a bit. TODO: clear up ambiguities between cloud/grid/saas/asp. samj (talk) 09:03, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I hope that edits made over the weekend clear things up a bit. samj (talk) 08:33, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Centralized Computing

I think we should discuss centralized computing... cloud computing is simply a buzzword for a flavor of centralized computing. Basically it's a fancy "futuristic" name that these upstart companies use because it is much easier to market. Technically, the differences are pretty insubstantial. The only difference I can think of is that the network is bigger. Software is stored on a central server, and computers access it via a network. --72.39.35.178 (talk) 16:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

• Strongly Disagree for reasons that should be obvious, not the least of which is 15,600,000 hits for 'cloud computing', 62,000 for 'centralized computing'. USPTO also just declared cloud computing both descriptive and generic which would suggest that the term (which appears in at least one dictionary already) is here to stay. Furthermore, there are both distributed and centralized aspects to cloud computing, particularly when you start talking about peer-to-peer applications (which have no place at all in centralized computing). I'm surprised we're having this discussion at all but nonetheless since you've suggested (twice now) that cloud computing be merged into centralized computing it belongs on the latter's talk page. samj (talk) 08:19, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Potential advantages

Doesn't this section should include something about scalability and fail recovery potential advantages?Orimosenzon (talk) 22:08, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

"The Cloud" image

Boy. that's helpful. Took a lot of work to create that image. Very artistic. The caption helps a lot. - Realkyhick (Talk to me) 18:21, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

The image is frivolous and therefore unencyclopedic. It's a Wikimedia Commons image so I suppose it cannot be conveniently put up for IFD. I will or someone else ought to remove it from the article unless its utility and encyclopedic nature can be clearly demonstrated. --AB (talk) 19:39, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah it took all of about 8 seconds to whip up in omnigraffle and replacing it with something more useful (like a sample network diagram) is on my todo list. Then again if you guys have both got time to complain about it here then presumably you've also got time to suggest (or create) a better replacement? samj (talk) 22:24, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

A sample network graph could be nice. Unlike you, I don't really know much about CC, so I don't know what to put in the diagram. I will remove the cloud image from the article for now, and hope that a nice network diagram magically appears. --AB (talk) 23:46, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok. TODO. samj (talk) 17:41, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Abstracted layering

The cloud mentality is in fact the idea that what's on the backend of the user interaction is a no-care. With the escalation in virtualization, this methodology becomes more prevelant across all layers of computer environments and user interfaces. A quick example would be that if a user required a database driven backend, it should not matter what operating system the database is actually deployed on as long as it is supported on that OS. One could even argue it shouldn't matter what database manager is installed for the same reasons, as long as dependency chains are met.

Further then that, not only the what of the install, but now, the where of the install becomes a "clouded" entity. Centralized computer farms could be established as shared resource pools, and as long as performance criteria are met, the users environment could now be deployed at a selection of physical locations.

Cloud computing is a suitible. name —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.67.121.215 (talk) 00:20, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

--Esolution (talk) 14:05, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Cloud computing is the mother of all abstractions. samj (talk) 09:15, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Cloud services vs. 'cloud computing'

I want to suggest that 'cloud services' are the proper term and 'cloud computing' just creates confusion as it's jargon-based. Cloud services are akin to web services, but outside the firewall. One poster asked about the difference between ASP and Cloud computing, mentioning that they seemed similar. They aren't. The ASP model is one of a complete application run in a hosted manner. Cloud services are discrete point services (storage, compute, payment processing, etc.). You put together a number of cloud services to build a complete application. This is EXACTLY the same as Web services. The major differences lie in the fact that 'web service' was mostly something produced and consumed behind the corporate firewall. Cloud services differ by being out in the cloud, providing access to everyone for that web service, and using some kind of innovative charge model (usually the 'utility' model) where anyone can afford it, even for a short period of time. I tried to outline this more here: http://neotactics.com/blog/technology/short-sighted-about-cloud-computing

My main thrust being that 'cloud service' == 'web service' might help clarify the discussion. 'Cloud computing' doesn't really relate to anything.

And yes, 'web service' is a terrible term, but it's somewhat established at this point. :D

Disagree Cloud services are a subset of cloud computing but they need not be web services n the traditional sense (eg REST/SOAP)... XMPP is used to push mail to iPhones for example... and I think we'll see increasing diversity going forward. samj (talk) 09:08, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok cloud service ~= web service, but cloud computing stays. Archiving. samj (talk) 10:59, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Grid computing

No fair removing opinion pieces about cloud not being ground breaking while leaving opinion pieces about how revolutionary cloud is. Gotta be fair here and present both sides of that debate Sam. --Rw2 (talk) 19:38, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Where is the debate? I'm yet to find anyone else claiming "a cloud is a resource on the grid" etc. samj (talk) 21:09, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

if this conversation is complete, I may archive it . Sanjiv swarup (talk) 06:58, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Cloud standards

Looking through the latter parts of this article it seemed like just about every web-technology is being now label as "Cloud-foo". DO we really need to list every web browser, every web language, every web standard in the article and create duplicate categories for all of these? Its all beginning to look a lot like original research unless citations can be found for all these products asserting something specific to cloud computing. --Salix alba (talk) 18:16, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

• Agreed we need references for this; most of the standards are by induction from Web 2.0, SaaS, etc. and some new ones are being discussed specifically in this context around storage, virtual machines etc. There will certainly be some standardisation of things like cloud databases (eg SimpleDB et al) in the future too. samj (talk) 10:19, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
• Regarding listing 'every browser' etc. I'd be happy enough to trim this back to ones that have targeted cloud computing environments; Chrome, maybe IE 8, probably FF4 etc. samj (talk) 10:20, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Introduction opaque

The introduction is opaque as hell, and gets worse and worse after the first sentence. Might someone perhaps provide a new lede that concisely says what the heck "cloud computing" actually refers to? --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 21:29, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Mass Archive November 2008

Changes Made

Moved the text from the Introduction into a heading called "Brief". AdityaTandon (talk) 07:57, 8 October 2008 (UTC) Aditya Tandon

Apple

I think Apple, Inc. should be added to the list of companies heading the "cloud movement". Since it has released it's new "MobileMe" service, it now has users doing a lot of cloud computing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Robo56 (talk • contribs) 14:54, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

• I'm unconvinced; the point is to illustrate what cloud computing is and Apple is well known to be a hardware company... your average joe thinks of ipods, iphones and macs. Conversely when one thinks Google you thinks Internet/cloud. That's not to say Apple doesn't get credit elsewhere for their efforts, just that they're not the best example. samj (talk) 08:09, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Yeah, same for SAP. 84.72.91.139 (talk) 08:32, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Cons

The article made no mention of the downside of cloud computing particularly the privacy issues with this technology. 78.86.217.191 (talk) 09:56, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

This article has a "Potential advantages" page. Wouldn't it make sense to add a "Possible Disadvantages" page for the sake of continuity? Wikipedia tries to be as non-objectionable as possible, so it seems like a good idea. --Jnorm (talk) 13:58, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Its a good point i think disadvantages also should be added. Kalivd (talk) 06:23, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

its a great idea.disadvantages should added so as to make people understand abt the article very well.Anoopnair2050 (talk) 15:11, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Cons about cloud computing any argument against adding the same to the article page

1. It’s not secure.
2. It can’t be logged. Tied closely to fears of security are fears that putting certain data in the cloud makes it hard to log for compliance purposes.
3. It’s not platform agnostic. Most clouds force participants to rely on a single platform or host only one type of product.
4. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.
5. Reliability is still an issue.
6. Portability isn’t seamless. As all-encompassing as it may seem, the so-called “cloud” is in fact made of up several clouds, and getting your data from one to another isn’t as easy as IT managers would like.
7. This ties to platform issues, which can leave data in a format that few or no other cloud accepts, and also reflects the bandwidth costs associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
8. It’s not environmentally sustainable.
9. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. As nebulous as cloud computing seems, the data still resides on servers around the world, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws.
10. The need for speed still reigns at some firms. Putting data in the cloud means accepting the latency inherent in transmitting data across the country and the wait as corporate users ping the cloud and wait for a response.

Kalivd (talk) 07:17, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

'Advantages' and 'Disadvantages' sections tend to read like datasheets and some 'advantages' are also 'disadvantages' (eg security can go both ways). I hope you are all satisfied with the 'key characteristics' section which should be unbiased statements of fact.

Regarding your specific points:

1. FUD. cloud computing is often more secure (particularly in terms of availability and integrity) than legacy systems.
2. FUD. there is no reason cloud offerings cant be logged, and most are. getting access to the logs can be difficult though so your comment is partially accurate.
3. if you have ever tried to deploy linux software in a microsoft shop or vice versa you will in fact appreciate the flexibility that not having to buy infrastructure affords you
4. again, there's nothing stopping you from using multiple products/platforms/providers (in fact it's easier as you don't need to invest)
5. Reliability is usually better than legacy systems
6. Portability is typically addressed via APIs which are settling down - yes this is a valid concern but no moreso than proprietary file formats
7. See above
8. FUD. You really think it's better to have every man and his dog running servers? I guess you would also argue that we should shut down the power stations and run diesel gensets too? Cloud is Green.
9. Cloud computing need not necessarily exist on physical servers, but the jurisdiction problem is real. Providers like Amazon are making 'local' datacenters available for europeans (others will follow), but harmonisation of regulations will become increasingly important going forward and is just a side effect of globalisation.
10. Bandwidth and latency requirements are highly application dependent; fast pipes are prevalent nowdays and solutions like gears help where they are not available. In any case moving infrastructure outside almost always helps distributed enterprises (as most are these days, with road warriors, work from home, decentralisation, etc.)

I agree that there are outstanding issues that need to be addressed, but I also believe that they will in due course. Conversation (like this) is the first step. samj (talk) 09:38, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Alright, can you collectively list out the disadvantages of cloud computing so that i can get a clear picture of the cons against the usage of cloud computing. Kalivd (talk) 06:00, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

As I said before: Advantages' and 'Disadvantages' sections tend to read like datasheets and some 'advantages' are also 'disadvantages' (eg security can go both ways).. A great example is Gartner claiming that the very opaqueness that makes cloud computing attractive to many (that is, that you don't need to see or care about what goes on inside) is in fact one of its greatest dangers. Anyway I'll run through and make sure the points are balanced.

I would appreciate the improvement.. Thank you. Kalivd (talk) 07:10, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

HTML? JavaScript? Ajax?

These have very little to do with cloud computing. I am removing them until someone gives me a reason they are there. — ^FatalError 07:52, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. Ajax enables processing to be done on the client side. Existing cloud based software (eg Salesforce, Facebook, Google Apps) uses Ajax extensively and indeed could not exist without it, so I would argue that it is a critical component of cloud computing. OTOH I agree with you that HTML and Javascript by themselves aren't interesting in the context of could computing, in the same way that TCP/IP is not really relevant. Let's leave Ajax and drop the others. samj (talk) 08:34, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Cloud Computing page suggested/request edits

Sam

The Cloud Computing page should be updated to include a few items. You appear to be active in this section and I cannot edit it due to a business relationship with one of the companies involved. Particularly, this sentence:

The cloud computing "revolution" is being driven by companies like Google, Red Hat[9], Salesforce and Yahoo! as well as traditional vendors including Hewlett Packard, IBM and Microsoft[10] and adopted by individuals through large enterprises including General Electric, L'Oréal and Valeo[11][12].

This sentence lists Google, Red Hat, Salesforce and Yahoo as leaders/drivers in cloud computing. It should begin with Amazon, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon and 3tera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3tera, who are pioneers in the efforts to offer commercial cloud services.

Among the large enterprises, you should also include British Telecom, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telecom, who is running on of the largest 3tera clouds in the world.

Additional, I suggest expanding this sentence into one or several paragraphs: Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of customers and typically offer service level agreements[6]. Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing[7].

This sentence is very accurate and important. Many of the commercial offerings fail to offer service level agreements or open standards, let alone suppor open source software (Google, Amazon and Yahoo, as far as I understand, do not but I am not an expert in this area:

Jonahstein 17:10, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Cloud vs Grid

Cloud computing is often confused with grid computing. Grid is a larger concept that allows access to many kinds of resources, including clouds. As such, a cloud is a resource on the grid. This confusion comes from the improper use of grid as a synonym for cluster and from the expansion of the term cloud (which originated as a term for compute access) to include storage (thus making it closer to a synonym to than to its utility computing origins). The majority of cloud computing infrastructure currently consists of reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers that are built on compute and storage virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere in the world, with The Cloud appearing as a single point of access for all the computing needs of consumers. Commercial offerings need to meet the quality of service requirements of customers and typically offer service level agreements[4]. Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing[5].

Reverted unreferenced, uncommented, controversial edits by numbered user. samj (talk) 08:44, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

More edits have been reverted and I had an offline discussion with the editor (Rw2) which included:

Anyway discussion is good but changing large swathes of an article with contentious views based on opinion pieces, blogs and an ancient reports without first obtaining consensus via the talk page is not on. Usually ancient isn't such a bad thing but the report you cited predates cloud computing by half a dozen years and fails to account for subsequent shifts in the grid area.

Furthermore it takes an otherwise quite clear definition of 'a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks' and replaces it with meaningless drivel that could apply to many different types of computing: 'creating a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities'. You could toss this on cloud, mainframes, distributed computing, centralized computing and no doubt hundreds of other computing articles and it would be impossible to differentiate between them.

Anyway, grid and cloud are accepted to be different things; if that weren't the case a new moniker would not have been invented. Yes there are similarities if you drill down to virtual machine providers like GoGrid, Amazon and Sun Grid (it's no wonder then that some of these providers have 'grid' in their name), but the similarities end there. Like it or not, in the eyes of the public grid is about high performance computing, batch jobs and coordination between large clusters run by different administrative domains. Most of the articles talking about cloud these days are actually talking about saas providers like google apps for example.

The point is that wikipedia readers should derive clarity rather than confusion from our articles, and it's our job to impart the consensus view on a subject while citing relevant, verifiable, notable references rather than anything we can find which reflects our views.

samj (talk) 06:05, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Centralized Computing

I think we should discuss centralized computing... cloud computing is simply a buzzword for a flavor of centralized computing. Basically it's a fancy "futuristic" name that these upstart companies use because it is much easier to market. Technically, the differences are pretty insubstantial. The only difference I can think of is that the network is bigger. Software is stored on a central server, and computers access it via a network. --72.39.35.178 (talk) 16:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

• Strongly Disagree for reasons that should be obvious, not the least of which is 15,600,000 hits for 'cloud computing', 62,000 for 'centralized computing'. USPTO also just declared cloud computing both descriptive and generic which would suggest that the term (which appears in at least one dictionary already) is here to stay. Furthermore, there are both distributed and centralized aspects to cloud computing, particularly when you start talking about peer-to-peer applications (which have no place at all in centralized computing). I'm surprised we're having this discussion at all but nonetheless since you've suggested (twice now) that cloud computing be merged into centralized computing it belongs on the latter's talk page. samj (talk) 08:19, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Sam Johnston, you are not the only person I want to read my comment. Don't go and "archive" it just because *you* don't like my comment or want to discuss it. --72.39.35.178 (talk) 06:01, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I disagree too. There is an implicit message in "Cloud Computing" that the data and computation is "someone else's problem". A workgroup email server on a remote site is not on the cloud. Furthermore, cloud application architecture is all about having many, many more servers than "a central server". There is one more datacentres, each with a number (possibly a few thousand) servers, with disks and interconnected by high speed networking. The disks fail, the servers crash, yet the cloud keeps working. All the old application designs that worked well on single server, even small cluster systems no longer apply. SteveLoughran (talk) 21:06, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I am not talking about email. I am talking about things like Citrix XenApp. How is "cloud computing" any different other than simply having a backup server? --72.39.35.178 (talk) 18:33, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Citrix looks like it is doing something that makes the clients look like thin terminals on a remote machine. But you know what? That's only one design, and its not how everyone else works. Look at Hadoop and read the MapReduce paper to see what other people are doing in their datacentres. This isn't the stuff old mainframes did; by embracing farms of commodity (and unreliable) computers, those people who are building the datacentres have suddenly taken a leap in what they can do. If you look at my slides [[3]] you can see that the jump from a cluster to a datacentre with a farm of computers and a high speed network fabric changes a lot of the assumptions. XenApp is an attempt to host existing apps on such an infrastructure. That doesn't mean its the right thing to do, just a stop-gap measure while the new architecture evolves and people outside google, Microsoft and yahoo start coding for it. SteveLoughran (talk) 21:26, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Could you give me something more substantial than agriculture analogies and motivational speeches about evolving assumptions and leaps and whether or not "it's the right thing to do?" Networks are not made of cloth and I do not grow corn in my computer. Keep your paradigms in your pants and just explain how it is all hooked up--I'm way more confused by jargon than a highly-complex but straightforward technical explanation. --72.39.35.178 (talk) 18:36, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I've revised the page's history and it started off saying it was just another "form" of grid or distributed computing; far more accurate in my opinion than the current version (despite it's many deficiencies). In my opinion, the term "Cloud Computing" is just another fine example of marketing and buzzword spinning than of anything tangible or specific. It's vague and it means many different things to many different people; all the hallmarks of good marketing. I think wikipedia is being used as an effective "marketing" tool for tech companies to peddle their vaporware terminology... along the lines that if Wikipedia says XYZ then there must be something to it. At the very least, this page should be flagged - it does not represent a true and factual account of anything and I question it's neutrality. CarlosLozanoDiez (talk) 17:02, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

The article's history is irrelevant - I invested a significant amount of time and energy into rewriting it from scratch as the previous version did not reflect reality. Cloud computing is not a marketing buzzword and most of the leading vendors (notably, including Microsoft, traditionally a staunch opponent) have changed direction to focus on it. -- samj _in^out 06:21, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Introduction paragraph

The introduction para is very very long, It just looks like a sea of blue links rather than a definition to me. As i go on reading, the very first para itself confuses me to such an extent that i really care a less about reading the whole article, thought of adding a suitable template for the cleanup purpose but before doing the same would like to discuss about this on the talk page. Any comments appreciated. Kalivd (talk) 14:39, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

someone just added to it earlier today, and yes, it does need taking a sharp knife to it by someone. Go for it! —Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveLoughran (talk • contribs) 16:24, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I just did a few changes Sanjiv swarup (talk) 02:41, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I feel Except for the first para rest all be put in a seperate para which speaks more about cloud computing. As on of the Wikipedian has mentioned above about the confusion it creates at the first instant. So putting it in proper paras might just help.

Dhoomady (talk) 07:18, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

It appears that the length issue has been addressed, so I removed the tag. momoricks ^talk 03:13, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. -- samj _in^out 06:28, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Google Chrome

Can this article please be more neutral? Google is not the center of the universe. Citing Chrome, for example, was a bit too much for me. More traditional browsers, such as IE and FF deserve the merit much more than that piece of failure called Chrome. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.16.37.118 (talk) 08:20, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

• I'm on OS X so I don't use Chrome (yet), but we need more from our browsers in terms of performance, scalability and security (I've lost count of the number of times I've lost a bunch of tabs to Firefox crashing and I haven't had a Windows box to use IE on since... what... 2005). IE8 might be a contendor, and possibly FF3, but the point was that cloud computing demands a new breed of browser. -- samj _in^out 23:16, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Easy to understand Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a type of New World Wide Web Infrastructure you might want to call it, whether or not the infrastructure will pertain to only mobile devices, desktop or even hybrid is not really clear.

Traditional World Wide Web work like the following

• Database (Server)
• Purpose-based Server (server that perform Services / Application, Browsing (Web), Gaming, Multimedia Broadcasting...etc.)

via

• Internet Cloud (2 parts: Infrastruture)

Hardware Infrastructure (DNS, Service Provider (ISP)...etc.) and Algorithm

Abstraction Infrastructure - They are thousand of Cloud in the entire internet, where each cloud represent a field of study (when you try to find stuff, such as on Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or any type of search engine) the Engine will use an Algorithm (or a Logical flow chart that try to find the most appropriate information for your accordingly).

The Semantic Web has developed by MIT define a clear set of method using programming language for categorizing each field of studies which are stored as prototype or netrual data.

• Your Computer

Cloud Computing

• Database (traditional Database, e.g. Data Center)

Purpose-based Server (virtualize)

• Internet Cloud

Service Provider (there is a catch, see Below)

• Your Computer (application are virtualize)

Note that Cloud Computing only accelerate the speed of processing, because application, services...etc. So the definition of Cloud Computing means that you can be anywhere in the world however, the Hardware Infrastructure of the internet cloud doesn't require any DNS, NetBIOS, LMHOST file so basically you are kind of connecting P2P. However, 90% of the people on the market right now is getting one information extremely incorrectly. That is Virtualization is a very object-orientated based meaning that the objects are more like container and the container can only obtain a certain type (or range) of data and they usually require API to communicate each other while API are written by IDL (Interface Definition Language) and several other Schema (definition language or languages that teaches computer how the language works), they are not flexible to semantic constraints and are doesn't have the capability to many variations.

In order for application to perform really well they need to be written in a topological structure where each stages and levels of coherency and relavance references are written in a clear way that it doesn't affect the traffic engineering of chipset, doesn't effect the physical and software level of parallelism, caches are allocated correctly through methods of file system, partition, or other structure methods of implementation.

So how does this translate ultimately? Well this can affect simple data-orientated presentation, such as presenting a simple graph, a SVG picture, high quality graphics, sharing, middleware communications. Faster method of protocols will also be hard to implant which can dramatically increase the ability to implant security algorithms, data are not easy translated. As time progress with each type of new concept of programming language such as event-driven programming (like application that are firmly concern with things like scheduling), these will decrease the performance, since data values are physical, where object can't really define values clearly such as Zero in one type of math translating to the defintion of Zero in other type of Math. In each program they can, but transfering through a fast standard of The Semantic categorizing fast growing infrastructure, it won't stand a chance.

--Ramu50 (talk) 04:04, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm more confused now. -- samj _in^out 17:24, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Add a "Criticism of cloud computing" section?

In The Guardian recently it's been reported that two significant people in the computer industry - Richard Stallman and Larry Ellison - have criticised the concept of cloud computing. Stallman called it "marketing hype", and Ellison called it "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish" - see here. Should such criticism be included, and if so, how? I would go ahead and just add a "Criticism of..." section myself, but I see the article's protected so maybe the whole concept's a sensitive subject. What do others think?--82.148.54.195 (talk) 11:47, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm in favour of criticism; I think the protection is related to WP:EL abuse rather than anything else. But, I'm not sure that rms's faults are valid. Also, if Oracle are so negative about it, why the recent launch of Oracle-on-EC2, combining Oracle 11g (g for grid) on top of Oracle's RedHat linux derivative, Unbreakable Linux.

Some criticism points are: too vaguely defined to be meaningful. Not a solution to many problems. Creates single points of failure in the infrastructure. For the latter, the S3 outage is a good example; a lot of sites broke when S3 stopped working. However, we really need citable criticisms, instead of inserting our own analysis. SteveLoughran (talk) 14:08, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

I totally disagree what Richard Stallman says, that is a direct-unintelligent comment that is similar to what Pat Gelsinger said about the future of Graphics processing. Yet few month later Microsoft and many other reviews have already debated of that topics. ref

--Off topic: From your link, "Gelsinger also added that, unfortunately, the software industry still doesn't take advantage of hundreds of threads and cores." This was a big mistake, or bad idea, by the CPU industry. If I send instructions to the CPU, it should send them through to its cores by itself. It is one CPU, it should act as one CPU, but only faster because it is being processed in parallel. With multiple GPU's do I need the game to be programmed for it? No, the drivers for the hardware take care of that. Think about cars with gas and electric engines, do I have 2 pedals in my car for the two engines? No, the car (it's computer) takes care of it for me. So, why do we accept these sub-standard features from the CPU industry now-a-days?--deewhite

• Moore's Law have been debated as some RAM companies hypothesize transistors might end by 2020 ref
• Intel Atom SCH, shows Intel lack of understanding of how multiplexing device work at all.

Also base on the past reputation of IDF and Intel inability to support bracket USB as a basic knowledge of comoputing, why should anyone believe in that buffoon.

Reading from that topic, I can already see that Richard don't even understand how Cloud Computing can change AJAX to a whole new level and implant parallel computing processor design which can work in sync with Cloud Computing and can dramatically increase the relational database processing. Likewise I think he is like the rest of the amateur who is still getting confused with UML and XML + OO objects and the previous things I just said. The proof is obvious, the article didn't comment anything that shows his understanding of the topic at all. It sounds more like he has an anger / frustration management issue than knowing what he is talking about.

Also the architecture of how a CPU-GPU has already been known to one of the company that make server and workstation CPU which I do not wish to reveal. With that being said, I think a lot of Intel and Microsoft are statements are totally immature and I do not trust their fact at all.

Actually there already been good YouTube videos that explain cloud computing quite well, the only thing is that too many companies right now is sometimes confused and almost reveal their secrets and the idea of cloud computing, so you can't really tell who is going in the right direction.

The fact is too many people right now in the industry is judging things by what is obvious and therefore is conditioned. It is similar what many reviews debate on Solid State products and Hard Drive, yet the only knowledge they use is power and speed. SSD (NAND, SLC or MLC) vs Hard Drive, CPU-GPU +/- programmable codec has, Cloud Computing are all products that haven't fully matured, so even if we are on the right track that doesn't mean you are correct. As other science has proven the just, because you are more "advance" doesn't mean you are the best. As recently the debate of evolution hypothesize that all animals may be all capable of doing the same thing, such as the ability to fly, it is just a matter of how efficiently they can fly. However, just because eagle can fly the best by using soaring, doesn't mean they are a good flyer, if you place them at an enviroment where there is nearly no wind, the feather basically is more heavy. You may say I am wrong, that not everything can perform "anything" they desire, but I am going to telly you that is where you are wrong. Data utilization can achieve that, unforunately very few people that I talk to before know how to utilize it at all due to insufficient knowledge.

More examples are For the past 30 some odd years, speed has already proven us that it is not a future, the ability to efficiently utilize data mangement knowledgeability towards a design is whats important as seen in Celeron, Pentium and Core processors all having speed such as 2.8GHz can have a dramatical difference in the workload. The same as Overclocking the highest speed doesn't gurantee stability in performance.

The reason why I don't want to reveal it, because Intel would go ahead and copy it straightaway, this is not the first time Intel have done it and I totally don't trusted the idoit and unethical practice of Intel as they always do one thing and say the other. As far I am concern, before they say their C2Q is better than Phenom and now they copy it, wtf. For Christ sake, over 15 ads I seen on TV about computers less than 3 ads advertise C2Q while they only advertise Core 2 Duo, yeah so much for the claims that society like to make. Load of crap. --Ramu50 (talk) 22:39, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Breaking news: threatened vendors critical of next generation tech. Film at 11. A criticism section is a slippery slope so valid, specific weaknesses have been rolled into the 'key characteristics' section (one man's weakness is another man's feature). -- samj _in^out 10:11, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

-- I definitely agree that there needs to be a criticism section: cloud computing is a marketing term and not a real computing term. As stated in the introductory section: "It is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, etc." THIS IS HOW THE INTERNET HAS ALWAYS WORKED! "Cloud" is the internet...well ya know what? Every server, desktop, TV set, handheld, etc. that has an IP addy IS the internet...it's always been that way, nothing has changed. When I connect to a site, I d/l a page and it is temporarily stored on my computer to display it. This is how it's always been.

"Software as a service" is a much better and more precise name for (some of) the same thing(s): it means that instead of buying software (like MS Word), I can go to a website and perform my word processing via a web portal. Even so, tell me, what has changed? Nothing. Is this revolutionary? No. Is Facebook a cloud computing service? No, it's a website, run off a server, that has an IP address, and is connected to the internet. Until Facebook is run off everyone's computer and moved around as people go on and offline, it will never be true "cloud computing". Think of P2P, that is almost cloud computing, but it is not a purely web-based "service" as it requires software installed on your computer to access the data, but even so, everyone needs a web browser to use Facebook/Gmail. I agree with the dissenters, cloud computing is nothing more than marketing hype for new services that people did not want to call Web2.0; so, they made up a new name. Wake up people! Now, if I am completely wrong here, then someone needs to clarify this entire page, because to me it all sounds like old crap being repackaged with a new crappy name. If I have a website on one server and it uses a database on another server, that doesn't make it cloud computing, it makes it the internet people!

One more note on SaaS: anyone remember "free" ad-based ISP's? Or, "free" ad-based computer programs? Yeah, they died because they sucked. So, why are we now accepting them just because they are on the internet and not installed on our computers? Gmail isn't free, you "pay" for it by using Google more and seeing more of their ads. Nothing changed except the location of the software and we are being bought right into it all over again. It ended badly the first time around, why is this time going to be different?

Furthermore, in the distributed work-load sense of the phrase, isn't this just a fancy word for virtual servers? Apache has had the ability to host numerous sites on one computer for awhile now... From the "Characteristics" section: "By sharing perishable and intangible computing power between multiple tenants, utilization rates can be improved (as servers are not left idle) which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development." Lets ignore the falsity that "the speed of application development" has anything to do with whether my webserver is being used to serve web surfers (how does my server serving content make me program slower?), this quote sounds exactly like Apache's virtual servers...am I wrong?

Does anyone remember internet computers (where you boot up from an internet-based OS)? If so, I bet only vaguely. Why? Because it was crap! What happens if your internet goes out? You can't boot your computer. IDIOTIC! Cheaper? Maybe, but still stupid overall.

From the previously linked guardian article: "pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net." Hasn't information always been delivered over the net? Isn't that what is was invented for? Again, what has changed enough to deem an entire new word/phrase? "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do," this is exactly correct!

Finally, I want to talk about security. Is it more secure to store my e-mails on Gmail, or to download and store them on my computer? That way when I am off-line, my data is off-line and inaccessible. How many Gmail accounts have been hacked while the user is off-line? How many have been tried to be hacked? If it's on my computer and I am off-line, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR IT TO GET HACKED. Less time on-line equates to safer data. That's why the golden rule for keeping sensitive data safe is, and has always been: Don't connect the computer to the internet. Why are we now trying to throw everything online and giving it to a corporation only interested in making money? Take AOL blogs, for example, they are shutting down their service on October 31st and providing no way for their customers to backup their blogs other than manually copy/pasting the text and "Save As"-ing the images. This is because they stored the data in a proprietary system and really don't care about our data. They only care that the service isn't bringing in money and are now leaving the users out to dry, without providing a way to convert their proprietary blog system into something open like WordPress. Why would they help their users, their users didn't bring in the ad money, screw their data. Is this really the path the internet should be taking?

This entire article needs removed and replaced with "See Web2.0" or, more accurately, "See Internet" links.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that "cloud computing" is not cool, has no benefits (for some, mainly the large corporations), or should be dissolved all-together. I'm just saying that the term is too broad & idiotic and that Stallman is right in saying that it reduces our (the peoples, the customers) ability to control OUR data. --deewhite

This has a strong focus on offline issues and makes various assertions that I don't think are valid, like that internet computers are IDIOTIC because Internet is unreliable - maybe in the US it is but at least here in France it's rock solid and on mobile devices where most of the action is these days it's virtually bulletproof (eg android, iphone). You also assert that keeping your mail on your computer makes it IMPOSSIBLE FOR IT TO GET HACKED, which is simply delusional.

I agree that the article needs to be balanced, but I have resisted Pro and Con sections because they create a free for all and are often incomprehensible (one person's con, like most of the things you cite above, is another's pro). -- samj _in^out 06:27, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Cloud-based version of wikipedia

Is there something like that yet? Nodes would communicate with each other a lot like file sharing applications do now, with articles being the items that were cached locally or searched for. Updates would be an interesting problem, but there is still a decentralization advantage here that could mean decentralizing and open sourcing the very last piece of the pie: the server hardware itself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zaphraud (talk • contribs) 00:43, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I think UML can utilize RPC to achieve that and in some virtualization. Theoretically it is very possible to achieve it, you just need to manage the protocol traffic engineering very well or else leakage would cause havoc that might lead to Data Duplication, faults...etc. --Ramu50 (talk) 22:53, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds something like Freenet. Interesting idea. Not relevant here. -- samj _in^out 10:12, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Private and Public

I’d like to suggest we add a definition of private versus public clouds to this page. The industry is embracing these terms and even starting to talk about “hybrid clouds” that are a combination of both public and private.

Private Clouds can be defined as: Private clouds use the public cloud architectures and methodologies but are deployed by a single organization inside the firewall. Resources are typically not shared with outside parties and full control is retained by the creating organization.

An example of a private storage cloud is: Private Cloud storage is typically a loosely coupled architecture, where the nodes don’t need to talk to each other to facilitate writing in parallel to a single file spread across multiple nodes. Instead meta-data operations are centralized enabling the data nodes to focus on delivering data to applications or users. Examples include ParaScale, Hadoop and mogilefs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mwmaxey (talk • contribs) 20:08, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Note: User:Mwmaxey appears to be Mike Maxey, Parascale's Director of Product Management. The Parascale article has been deleted as G11 (blatant advertising) and user warned about conflicts of interest. -- samj _in^out 17:22, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

There is ample confusion already (not to mention significant dissent) where the purpose of the article is to give clarity. While it is quite possible that 'private cloud' purveyors like ParaScale will be succeed in co-opting the cloud computing moniker to mean something different, the vast majority of cloud computing discussion is about Internet based solutions; we'll review this when and if that changes. -- samj _in^out 17:22, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree; additionally, private/public is quite self-explanatory and there are many other resources/articles to explain what a private network is. There is no need to spoon-feed the readers with this.--deewhite —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.18.230.145 (talk) 07:26, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

definition

Is ad-hoc network cloud computing? Is brainstorming a model of cloud computing? --Ramu50 (talk) 02:54, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Any definition that starts with 'means' and goes on as this article begins is a really poor definition. The definition includes the word 'cloud' several times - in itself a poor move - which itself is never further defined. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.50.46.9 (talk) 11:13, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

• Thanks for the feedback. Fixed (hopefully). -- samj _in^out 23:16, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

＠＠ what do you mean by the word 'mean'. Though I think this video does a quite clearn and structure. Somehow for the past few days, I think cloud computing is just simplifying the structure of database into object-based orientation (I am not talking about ORM or OODBMS) which is a faster way of accessing data. Traditional RDBMS and ORMs seems like it is more suitable for HPC, Supercomputer and other high performance application, thus not suitable for desktop. The object-based I am talking about is the UML model. I think mobile device is doing so well, because the engine that runs the OS is built by a framework, which is drastically different from desktop kernel which is so complex, that is why things like Driver will take so long to write. However, when the engine is built by a framework, everything is so structured by concepts like CRUD, ACID...etc that implanation are offloaded thus you retrieve thing so easily. Model that use it are ActiveX, ADO, OLE, Silverlight, Flash, C#...for more info see the stuff I write before [Template talk:Databases Click Here]. --Ramu50 (talk) 03:31, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Can anybody name me a normal desktop computer software which uses internet and could not be considered "cloud computing". And of course explanation why? --82.203.173.213 (talk) 09:44, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

• Yeah, sure... FTP clients for example usually just connect to a single server for a point-to-point transfer... use it to access a cloud based CDN on the other hand and you've got 'cloud computing'. 84.72.91.139 (talk) 08:34, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

What is Cloud Computing (simplified version)

DO NOT go back to the Archive and read

• Easy to understand Cloud Computing

That is a horrible example I made before and it is way too technical.

New Explanations (Digrams)

---

Cloud Computing for me I think is probably a new sets of technology that work in an infrastructure, known as The Cloud. First you should know how traditional internet works. For most programmers I think the first chart is very obvious.

Diagram 1

Database

• (e.g. SAN [storage area network], VTL [virtual tape library], holographic storage])

Purpose-based server

• (refer to application server, game server, web server…etc.)

ISP

• mainly control the network traffic

ATM & SONET was placed there just to show that other types of network infrastructure also exist.

MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) WAN (Wide Area Network) Home Business (SOHO, Enterprise)

Diagram 2

AI (Artificial Intelligence) SAN (Storage Area Network)

So to implant cloud computing there are two method. Implant technologies in purpose-based server. Implant virtualization in your purpose-based server. Since webpage scripting should be build using JSON, XML (interchange formats) and in the future Aspect-Orientation (traffic control) Programming. Each virtualized application act as a (communication portals) and thus it can connect to multiple devices mediums (e.g. mobile devices, desktop devices, game consoles).

Another way to connect to other mediums it to build web applications that can support synchronization and integration technologies such as Office Live.

(Read the Virtualization Classification)

Implant technologies in your Databases -for the past decade bioinformatics and IT have been trying to work together to develop a technologies that can make database information act as DNA so it can behave artificial intelligently -Well for a start you can implant Storage Virtualization and The Semantic Web (efficiently classifying and managing the data) and than implant an AI. Since middleware itself is an API, you can implant it to communicate with other devices mediums. Except our technologies is so little right now that probably the only service middleware can provide is XMPP phone calls. Or while you are skiing, you take a couple of photos and use the middleware to gather a bunch of friends from other place and share the picture (temporarily).

Since purpose-based and database in the future might be standalone, and do not require each other, they itself will act as a service provider and servicing desktop web services thus making the entire web acting like a P2P and P2P just looks like a cloud.

Virtualization is usually classified into the following

Hardware based

• Hardware-assisted (Virtual Machine, codes are complied or interpreted e.g. JVM)

benefits: Cross-platform

• Emulator

---

• OS level virtualization

the most common form of virtualization that uses a Hypervisor to virtual a Virtual Machine.

• Network Virtualization

programming the entire network using network devices (such as Routers) to create a VLANs

• Storage Virtualization

basically they use a different set of (Network) File System interface technologies, e.g. LDOMs (LUN, SMB, CIFS)

They are other types of Virutalization that many coorporation claim to be a type of virtualization, but some of them I am still trying to understand them, while the other I totally disagree with their concept.

Mobile devices usually use a bytecode or runtime compiler to run the mobile framework and hosted Virtual Machine or Browsers to communicate with applications. Since webpage can be entire build with XML (static interaction), JSON (dynamics interaction) and AOP the entire browsing will totally speed up, because (runtime engine---via---MVC).

The mobile framework is acting as a framework.

Commentary

I REALLY suggest you learn and implant JSON and XML. The currently world believing in JavaScript must be needed or must not be needed is entirely stupid, aspects, objects and data are the fundamentals elements of programming computer science, you can’t omit them, you have to organize them at “EVERY” single level, MVC level, coherency, traffic flow, behavior….etc. --Ramu50 (talk) 00:54, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Summary

Server (XML, JSON, AOP) interchange, synchronization, integration Virtualization layer

Purpose: to act as a service provider

In Diagram 2, I draw the ISP as the background, because I think in the future ISP will be integrated into the purpose-base server, but that will only happen if the industry decide to implant the TCP/IP OSI model + GSM specifications. Because I think the industry is dumb not to develop a management systems for managing traffic control.

Of course, they are other implementations that most industry haven't notice at all, but I am not going to reveal it, because they are just going to steal my information.

Reference: Database (template)
Other brainstorming topics: Visual Thesaururs --Ramu50 (talk) 23:16, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Wow, you're obviously putting your heart and soul into this... thanks for your efforts and apologies for archiving something that may have still been current. To be honest I'm still a little confused by these diagrams (mostly by the relevance of some of the components) but it's clear that you are viewing the cloud from a different perspective - from 'underneath' perhaps while I am looking at it from a user's point of view. Anyway, interested to see what comes next. -- samj _in^out 11:33, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion

Thanks for your efforts. I was thinking you should be able to represent cloud computing with the actual physical things involved: computers. The Internet is fundamentally three different kinds of computers: servers, clients, and let's call the in-between computers routers. So could you draw a diagram using these three basic elements, and then show how the information flows through the system. I think this will help simplify it more than protocols and acronyms and artificial intelligence, because that's about as illuminating to most people as drawing a cloud on a whiteboard.--72.39.35.178 (talk) 03:29, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Ramu50 has been blocked indefinitely due to a long history of tendentious editing, editing against consensus, and NPA violations. I haven't looked at what he's written (or drawn) here in much depth, but based on the quality of many of his other contributions, the number of times he's been reverted, the zeal with which he attacks anyone who disagrees with him, and the repeated calls for him to "please stop", I wouldn't count on his material here to provide any new insights into how to best describe cloud computing. His way of looking at things seems to be unique and is almost never in agreement with either reliable sources or consensus. I would advise simply moving the section he's written here to an archive and forgetting about it. Jeh (talk) 05:22, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Already did that once, and he's back. Maybe you're right. 93.3.248.168 (talk) 00:08, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

If you don't know anything about Cloud Computing mine as well stop bragging. --70.79.65.227 (talk) 08:26, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

External Links Diagram

Regarding about external links diagrams. Currently they are a lot of company out there that have a diagram of the infrastructure. Many of them claim to be cloud, but if you wish to place a diagram there, try to choose a diagram that includes most of the technologies. Not a diagram that only focus on a topics, the information is too forefont, but not everybody may agree with your opinion, so its best to place them to each article accordingly.

Because the number of technologies that Cloud can use is nearly infinite. Some believe in the following

• ("as a "service")
• { Web Application (+/-) Web Services (+/-) WebOS } Buisness Processing
• middleware tunneling

• platform computing
• edge computing
• elastic computing
• green computing
• virtualization

and many more...etc.

Note: Many of the types of computing does exist in Wikipedia, but are only recognized or introduced by some companies we shouldn't eliminate them. The Cloud Computing has even reach a pre-mature stage, so its not for us to judge who is correct since the industry haven't agree on a common standards or a common concept. Therefore try to be openminded.

The (+/-) means "and / or"

e.g WS (+/-) Web Application.

Actual meaning: Web Service and/or Web Application

I choose Enomaly ECP diagram, because it include the following: VPN, middleware, API, WS and little of Platform Computing prototype ideas. Hope you can find a better one.

Suggestions

Another great way to organize Cloud Computing external links, I would suggest is whenever an example or company is placed. Record down every one of them, and organize them by type of services / companies.

e.g. Are they the following

• DotComs
• Server Products (software)
• Services
• Solutions
• Platforms
• Mobile Application

I think this will give everybody a better idea of what cloud computing actually is, instead of arguing what technologies is cloud computing. Thus it will clear up of what is "as a service", platform computing...etc (<--the aforementioned topics)

Though I guess in the future the Cloud Computing article will mostly likely be explaining the types of implementations, history, practices...etc. and probably things like traditional approaches, methodologies. --70.79.65.227 (talk) 04:33, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Links to examples or companies usually are not appropriate. See WP:EL, WP:SPAM, and WP:NOTLINK --Ronz (talk) 05:15, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

The aforementioned subjects I mentioned clearly support that this isn't spam, and this clearly isn't an example, it is a reference diagram intended for users understanding how Cloud Computing works. Since the infrastructure section doesn't have any structure paragraph develop on this subjects, yet. I think this diagram would serve a well guide as it encompass more than just one topics. Users can then find out each of the technologies if they wish to learn on the technicality of the subjects. Though this may not be the best one, but we should try to find more, and choose the best one accordingly.

If the diagram only deals with one subjects that is spam (advertising), but in this case it isn't. --70.79.65.227 (talk) 05:43, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

While it is indeed advertising, it's clearly promotional. Further, we're here to write encyclopedia articles, rather than to link to other sources of information. If you want to dispute this further, WP:THIRD would be a good place to do so, or anything else recommended in WP:DR. --Ronz (talk) 15:43, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I am placing it back on, as you are unable to provide any evidence that it is advertising. The links does meet any of the with WP:EL, WP:SPAM, and WP:NOTLINK policy violation. Also before I asked should be just link the image, you ignore my questions and insists of removing it and end of story without any evidence, that is violating WP:CONS.

Edit summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cloud_computing&diff=256171873&oldid=256160287

((rv) This isn't advertisement, if the company allow Wikipedia to use the 
diagram copyright I wouldn't have link it.)

--70.79.65.227 (talk) 20:27, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but the burden of evidence is with you. See WP:PROVEIT. --Ronz (talk) 02:42, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I already prove the diagram doesn't violate the policy. --70.79.65.227 (talk) 10:35, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks like I'm not the only one that disagrees. Thanks for not reverting it back yet again. --Ronz (talk) 16:25, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Ronz. Turns out this was Ramu50 again (as a sock), even though Enomaly have a very long history of spamming Wikipedia. -- samj _in^out 18:14, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Advertising Tone

This whole article needs to be rewritten to deal with its advertising tone. It is full of hype and it is blatantly promoting its subject as a product. --Nogburt (talk) 04:53, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Unsurprisingly, I disagree. This 'hype' has been thoroughly validated by changes in focus by virtually all significant vendors (even those like Oracle and Microsoft who have traditionally bashed their cloud based counterparts) and the article is balanced, referring to the pros and cons in the key characteristics section. Wording like 'reliable services delivered through next-generation data centers' sounds positive, but it's accurate... the services are reliable and data-centers next generation. I'm removing the blanket tag, but encourage you to identify passages that are inappropriately worded, so as we can reference, remove or rewrite them. Thanks. -- samj _in^out 06:38, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Here are some areas:

-The Political Issues section starts off with "The Cloud spans many borders and "may be the ultimate form of globalisation"". This sentence just isn't helpful. -The list of Companies in the Brief section isn't neutral. It is irrelevant as to whether or not these companies do or don't do whatever here. This listing is, though true, advertising (name dropping). I'm considering cutting it entirely. -The Key characteristics section is listed as if it was from a marketing presentation. Again, true or not, it needs to be presented in a neutral manner. The "Sustainability" point specifically is improper. A lot of things are "more sustainable" that doesn't mean that it is relevant or proper to them all to be noted as "sustainable". --Nogburt (talk) 21:49, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok so there are political issues because the cloud spans many borders... reword it if you must but multiple jurisdictions are one of the single biggest hurdles for cloud computing. The latter part is a quote, and I would say a relevant one.

Listing companies is useful iff the companies listed are already associated with 'cloud computing'. Google and Salesforce are two obvious examples. Facebook might be another. Listing SAP, Microsoft, etc. regardless of whether they are getting involved now, is more likely 'advertising' for those companies. Granted there are categories which contain this information but listing a few (2-4) of the best examples of cloud computing actors is IMO a good idea.

The key characteristics section, as I have explained before, was intended to list exactly that... characteristics. One man's pro is another man's con, and many issues (eg security) would appear in both lists anyway.

Sustainability is a big issue today, and cloud computing, by vastly improving resource utilitisation, is (or at least can be) a sustainable solution. My partner is a sustainability engineer so this is stuff I'm exposed to every day; I assure you that very few computing solutions come close to the benefit that cloud computing is able to offer. Conversely, these installations do centralise consumption of copious quantities of power so there are associated concerns about sourcing cheap power (which essentially translates to dirty coal). -- samj _in^out 22:02, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about being too brief above. My issue with the quote in the political issues section is simply that the section itself is begins with the full quote as opposed to original prose. I guess you fixed that?

If you think that sustainability is a big issue with cloud computing, I'll go with that as you seem nearer to the subject than me.

Thinking about it, I guess a lot of what is getting me about the article is its heavy use of very hierarchical lists as opposed to prose. I'm not a cloud computing professional by any means. I came upon the article trying to learn about cloud computing but I didn't seem to get whatever it is that a reader might want from it. I spent more time thinking about the quality and presentation of the content I was reading (primarily as a result of the many lists) than the content itself.

But regardless of my lack of technical knowledge on the subject, as a reader there is something that can be improved. Such an article isn't written for cloud computing professionals anyways (they can read it of course, but it ought to help lay readers understand its subject). Often times those closest to a subject are less inclined to make a lay-friendly article than those less near to it. I'm sure some investment banker might have jotted in some nice things (and lists of relevant companies) for mortgage backed securities back in 2005. Perhaps many of these things would turn out to be the opposite of useful. Those nearer to a subject can be more prone to the latest industry trends which may not be optimal content here.

I could put it this way: a good Wikipedia article should have content that is given in such a way that a fair subject-lay reader who spent some time just on that article, and perhaps a few of its linked sources, could take what he learned and replicate the content and manipulate it into some other format.

If I applied this rule of sorts to this article, I could rewrite a lot of it in prose; but it would be a poor work. But it would be poor on account of the content that I set out to replicate in prose more than my ability to write prose (or lack thereof). There's actually a lot of content here, but I just can't translate it into prose without some additional knowledge of the subject.

I'm something of a humanities man (although I know quite a bit about economics). Here's the key question: Would someone from some non-tech savvy background get what a reader of a Wikipedia article wants to get out of this article?

--Nogburt (talk) 09:38, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

The article's already long - turning the lists into prose as you suggest would likely make it less readable. 93.3.248.168 (talk) 02:28, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Definitely several of the lists should stay. But in many other places the lists should either be made into prose or perhaps even broken off into separate articles. Actually that would also be a thing that we could discuss. Is this article too big for just one article? ----Nogburt (talk) 16:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

At 34k, not quite yet but it's something we'll likely have to look at before too long. -- samj _in^out 01:06, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Cloud image

I just came across this article due to my Twitter search stream for "Wikipedia" picking up a tweet making fun of it [4]. I'm usually a big fan of any kind of graphics in articles, but I have to admit that File:TheCloud.svg doesn't seem to really add anything to the article, and may in fact may detract a bit. In case I'm missing something here, I wanted some input from the article's regular editors rather than removing it unilaterally. Cheers! —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 09:49, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

I replaced the previous image with this one, as I thought it was a bit too technical for the intro section and wasn't even a particularly good diagram to introduce the topic. I'll admit the current image isn't really much more than decorative though. Letdorf (talk) 19:22, 18 January 2009 (UTC).

This was a placeholder for the replacement that never came, and a bit of a joke in itself. It's already been discussed and removed before, but I'm still not sure of a decent replacement - I tried a few with users hanging off it but none of them looked great. Anyway it's not urgent. -- samj _in^out 20:22, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Per se, humour does not make a text, an illustration or any other form of knowledge inapproriate, uneducational, or unencyclopedic; see the Name of the Rose. The problem with the image then was that it lacked a caption, thus not providing a context and leaving the uninformed reader unenlightened as why it might be humouristic. I've know written such a caption[5], and I'm not certain that it cannot be improved. ¨¨ victor falk 11:21, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

No, the problem is that it is so dreadfully amateurish and whimsical that it negatively impacts the article. If we're going to use humour at all, I'd consider waiting for something which doesn't require a multi-line caption in explanation. This should be removed again. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:15, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

As there's been no further comment regarding this, I'm removing the image again. Images are not mandatory, and this one is whimsical at best and idiotic at worst. We don't need a placeholder. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:01, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed, good call. -- samj _in^out 14:42, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Resolved by creation of File:Cloud computing.svg -- samj _in^out 09:14, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Cloud Computing Definition

You should not justify a point untill it's made. Entering references in the middle of the sentence is not correct.

And misuse of parenthesis andq uotation marks still apply. Also, I had corrected irrelevant or wrong links. You should not give links to every word that has an article written. You should only give links when the reader might need to understand some other term in order to understand the article. The links to The Cloud and Everything as a Service are ridiculously irrelevant. Stop link spamming!!! --Emre Kenci (talk) 15:30, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

So as I said before, please identify any relevant policy or guideline regarding our "misuse of parenthesis andq uotation marks" before reverting again. And while you're there you might want to take a look at WP:LINKSPAM because it seems you're confused... the as a service article was created specifically to support this one and to consolidate the common features of SaaS, PaaS, etc. - thus is is absolutely relevant. The Cloud explains what the cloud is so it's relevant too. In any case there is no need to come in here and abuse us because you don't like our punctuation style. -- samj _in^out 17:12, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand how making corrections is abusing. Anyway I suggest you read Wikipedia:Manual of Style in particular the quotations and parentheses part. The way they are used in the current version is simply wrong. I will leave correcting them to you since I feel you have the my-article-no-one-can-edit attitude which is common. have fun cloud boy :) --Emre Kenci (talk) 19:32, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Right so your condescending "teaching native speakers punctuation" edit above refers to this policy which specifically allows for both scare quotes and parentheses. Next time RTFM before referring to it. -- samj _in^out 22:13, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Punctuation aside, The Cloud is a dab page and hence not very useful to link to here. To quote WP:D, "With very few exceptions, creating links to disambiguation pages is erroneous". Letdorf (talk) 11:08, 12 February 2009 (UTC).

The usage in the definition are not examples of scare quotes. "Scare quotes indicate to the reader that the word or phrase does not signify its literal or conventional meaning" both cloud and computing words signify their conventional meanings. AND even if it was appropriate to use scare quotes for those words, the parentheses are still wrong. There's nothing about the use of parentheses in scare quotes. Leave aside being wrong, they add nothing to the understandability of this article and decrease its readibility. The article The Cloud should be copied to Wikitionary--Emre Kenci (talk) 13:41, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

You're probably right but I tend to stick to WP and commons so I've tagged it accordingly for someone else to take care of. Turns out The Cloud definition is from this article anyway. -- samj _in^out 17:24, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I guess we agree on the misuse of scare quotes too. Please do not press on with this, I made quite a research on it and I'm %100 sure that it is wrong to use parentheses and scare quotes together. Scare quotes alone is the appropriate punctuation here. If you revert this edit without any arguments again, I warn you, it will be the third time. No offense. --Emre Kenci (talk) 14:53, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Second thoughts it might also be appropriate to use parentheses, Sam you might decide it better because it changes by what you're actually trying to emphasise. If "It is their word not mine is what you're trying to say then scare quotes. If you want to clarify, to place an afterthought, or to add a personal comment go with (). BUT not together! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Emrekenci (talk • contribs) 15:02, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

It is legitimate and intended to use both together, as it seems you have discovered. Scare quotes can be used inline to indicate that it's not "my" word, or that validity is questioned (e.g. Don't "diss" the editors) and parentheses reduce the emphasis, like an aside or whispering during a discussion. Here's some example from these style guides:

3. Punctuation. (a) Use double quotation marks for direct quotations and for qualified words/phrases (“scare quotes”), as well as for titles of shorter works (articles, poems, and short stories).

Double quotes are used for quotations and for the introduction of new terms ("scare quotes")

Double quotation marks can also be used sparingly for terms used in a semi-technical sense or terms whose validity is questioned (“scare quotes”).

In this case it is both not "my" word and it's not inline, so both are called for. Thanks for playing. -- samj _in^out 18:51, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Cloud Storage

Added some information on it, with some comparison between the traditional way and how it is now. Bruce404 (talk) 19:36, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

• Good idea... need some good refs for this. samj (talk) 08:10, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Adobe AIR? Silverlight?

Any comments on the suitability of Adobe AIR and Silverlight? I've thus far left them out because they aren't true standards (although some components of AIR have been released?)? samj (talk) 08:34, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Anyone? samj (talk) 06:37, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok I've done some more research myself:

• Microsoft Silverlight sounds very proprietary and this doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.
• Adobe AIR is a similar story, even if the Adobe Flex component is partly open - the SDK's MPL'd but the tools to view (Flash) and create the content will remain proprietary.

Accordingly I don't see any point in listing either amongst a swarm of other open standards but am still interested to hear about how others feel on this point. samj (talk) 07:19, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

--Potentially incorrect thoughts: Wasn't flash finally released as open source (if not completely free software)? That's why there are third-party flash video players now. Right?

Anyways, it's moot. AIR and Silverlight are just new/different forms of the Java Runtime Environment. They are basically VM programs that allow you to install the same program under different architectures. Think of Azureus, you need JavaRE installed first. Azureus speaks to Java, Java speaks to your computer. This is not cloud computing, it is a program running on top of a program environment running on your computer. Think of it like this: Flash is a web only, web based runtime environment. AIR/Silverlight are full functioning, computer based runtime environments.--deewhite

Not sure about that... Silverlight seems to be more a presentation layer (WPF)... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.205.195.34 (talk) 10:29, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

That could definitely be right. Silverlight doesn't seem to be as full functioning as AIR. However, they do have Silverlight for Linux (and Mac?). WPF is a subsystem of .NET & Silverlight is a subsystem of WPF. "Microsoft Silverlight is a web-based subset of WPF that enables Flash-like web and mobile applications with the same programming model as .NET applications. 3D features are not supported, but XPS and vector-based drawing are included." (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation) On that note, it still allows for the same application to be installed under different OS's without rebuilding the app for the OS specifically. Conversely, AIR is not a subset of anything, it is a standalone compatibility layer.--deewhite

Ok, thanks for this interesting analysis. Do we think it's on-topic for this article or not? I'm still unconvinced, though a generic comment about technologies which enable client-independent delivery (eg Java, AIR, Silverlight) and rich applications could be kosher. 86.68.200.71 (talk) 08:13, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Is there a Rich Internet Applications article this one can point to? No point duplicating stuff. SteveLoughran (talk) 16:47, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and I've recently given it an overhaul. -- samj _in^out 01:07, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Security

Are there any legal issues related to the security of cloud computing? For example, what are the legal implications of the use of cloud computing to process sensitive information? 69.140.152.55 (talk) 19:10, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

• Yes, of course there are - that discussion is just starting to heat up now and it would probably be worth documenting here as consensus is reached. Thanks for the suggestion. samj (talk) 07:13, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

This was my first thought when I heard about this sort of system. It's not addressed here at all. Suggest considering a section, even if brief, regarding the privacy or lack thereof of one's information in a cloud computing system. Fraoch Dubh (talk) 00:53, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Maybe a risks section? The issues are security -can you trust the host not to lose your data. Data Protection: EU rules etc, privacy -does your hosting service look in the data itself. Also, are the legal requirements for the police to access hosted data less than for data on private systems? SteveLoughran (talk) 16:46, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. This should definitely be covered in the risks section. If consensus hasn't been reached, then the state of the art should be documented and then updated as it progresses. The legal jurisdiction of the vendor holding your data is also important because it limits recourse when security is breached as well. Here are two incidents relating to violation of medical privacy laws by someone in the outsourcing chain. While these were not a result of cloud computing, similar risks are entailed by cloud computing customers if their vendor allows data/instances to migrate across legal boundaries:

• Virginia VHA records at risk from subcontractor
• Pakistani transcriber threatens to release UCSF medical records

This second case out of San Francisco describes the risk that a single administrator might be able to block access to the cloud computing resources.

• Lawyer says client was protecting city's code

Ellison rains on the cloud

from the Register:

Ellison rains on the cloud

Bizarrely, our tip of the hat goes to America's second-best paid corporate executive - Larry Ellison who punctured the hot air on this year's biggest buzz-phrase: cloud computing. As with web services, service oriented architectures (SOAs), and Web 2.0 before it, "cloud" became abused by marketing drones, start ups, and middle-aged vendors desperate to sound relevant. "Cloud is complete gibberish," Ellison told his OpenWorld 2008 conference, noting - correctly - the phrase is being used to describe everything from Gmail to Salesforce.com's customer relationship management and platform. "What the hell is cloud computing? I don't understand what we'd do differently in light of cloud computing other than change the wording on some of our ads," Ellison said. "When is this idiocy going to stop?" Amen.--Espoo (talk) 01:22, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Chrome a client?

How is Chrome a client? It's just another webbrowser. If Chrome is listen, then why not IE, Firefox and Opera aswell? It seems to me that people are just trying to draw attention towards chrome. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.178.206.30 (talk) 12:13, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

See archives. Chrome is quite a different beast from the other browsers architecturally, but with FF3 here and IE8 around the corner it's less clear that it's alone. -- samj _in^out 00:09, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

The first real cloud

There is some disturbtion about a link I added. Plese take a look at the website I linked and feel free to let me know if the link should be added to the page.

• "Introduction into the first real live "virtual cloud" named virtual storm. Jan, 20 2009"

Virtual Storm is a website that explains what we feel to be the first actual up and running Virtual Cloud. We have separated the client from the hardware using Vmware ESX to virtualise the images. We added a brand new product on the market to seperate the software form the images. In our Virtual storm the image is only 1.2 GB and it connects to a centralised repository where all the applications reside. Every client uses a patented piece of software that redirects the software inside the image when the user has the rights to use the application. Regards Erik Keep Wikipedia clean, but don't leave it emptyErikw11 (talk) 20:07, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I'd say that if it's notable enough to hold its own article then it may be worth a mention... otherwise there's plenty of similar projects out there. -- samj _in^out 01:04, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

'The first real cloud' is a bit of a stretch BTW. -- samj _in^out 01:05, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Is Cloud Computing is a type of business computing?

Do people agree that Cloud Computing is a different style of business information management systems. Because looking at the technologies "as a service", they seems like a new model of Internet Hosting Paradigm that derived from distributions.

Paragraph 2 says its utilize Web 2.0. It somewhat support the idea of retail. Examples are Blogs and SMS are the same thing (in a way). They are different "form" of communication communicating through different "mediums."

SMS is through "mobile" Blogs is through "web" Isn't this the concept of retailing?

I am not sure is my idea wrong? Does anyone have any insights for a better guidance? --142.22.48.251 (talk) 04:30, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

If you can find reliable sources to back up your hypothesis, then go ahead and cite them. Otherwise, this counts as original research, which is against the rules of WP. Letdorf (talk) 10:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC).

I tend to agree with Letdorf... sounds like OR, or at least something that belongs more in the Web 2.0 article itself. We could however probably afford to talk more about the effects of migrating capex to opex, etc. but I'm not sure that's really what you had in mind. Anyway web 2.0 is more about usages, cloud about resources. -- samj _in^out 05:04, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

What's behind "The Cloud"?

Unfortunately, "the cloud" is currently used for everything that's offered in the internet, hiding the real philosophy behind this term. "The Cloud" is about SOA and interoperability. There is a must-read interview with Russ Daniels, CTO and VP of HP's Cloud Services Strategy at arstechnica. He really captures the ideology behind the cloud:

"One of my favorite examples is, I have a car that has an entertainment system that supports Bluetooth so I can use it as a hands-free headset. But to be able to do voice dialing, I have to load the contact list from my phone into the car. [...]

But the whole idea is flawed because my phone's not authoritative for my contact information. The phone has a local cache of information that it gets from Outlook. But Outlook's not authoritative for my contact information, neither is Gmail, neither is my Vonage, neither is Grand Central, neither is the six or eight other things that I have in my life that think they are.

What none of them do is the simple thing of, "tell me the URL for your contact service." Additionally, it has to be a service, not a repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries."

That meaning of "The Cloud" should be in the article. There's also a lot of other stuff in the interview that should be included in this article. Tdanecker (talk) 23:13, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

While a good example this is too technical for the audience. -- samj _in^out 13:26, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

The example doesn't have to be put 1:1 in the article, but I'm missing the general ideology of the cloud. The article focuses mostly on the "there's a service in the cloud that can be used everywhere" part, and less on the "devices have no local state but only cache things" part. That may be due to the current hype where every service offered in the internet is advertised as "cloud computing". The article should not represent this marketing strategies but the real idea behind the cloud (stateless devices/thin clients and their use of such services). Tdanecker (talk) 15:53, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

We could certainly talk more about "thin" clients like netbooks etc... -- samj _in^out 04:49, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Why do they have to keep coming up with buzzwords that

pretty much mean something that is already there but they want to give it a marketing boost, and an encyclopaedia shouldn't pander to that... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.132.224.196 (talk) 05:20, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I also hate the word "Cloud Storage". It's nothing more than online storage and we also had such stuff previously (without using the word "cloud"). And why has this article has to be based on those marketing terms? IMO, this article should be based on the new ideology of "cloud computing" and those whole hype/marketing-stuff should be mentioned in one small paragraph. Unfortunatly it's difficult to see what "cloud computing" really is because all those marketing/hype-stuff generates so much noise which sadly gets reflected everywhere (including a lot of professional magazine articles). If someone would like to meet my request of overhauling the whole article, I can only recommend reading the arstechnica interview with Russ Daniels (as I've already mentioned twice in this discussing): Part 1 Part 2 Tdanecker (talk) 22:08, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I also hate the word "Cloud Storage"...my request of overhauling the whole article... hmm that's a bit throwing the baby out with the bathwater don't you think? And based on an opinion piece from a box maker that (unsurprisingly) starts off by equating the cloud to a datacenter and then dives straight into a whole lot of detailed discussion about parallel programming and the like? Interesting, yes, for us programmers, but hardly encylopedic.

Don't stress too much about the "cloud" moniker - it'll fade into the background when everyone's doing it and we'll be back to calling it "computing" again. -- samj _in^out 03:53, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I hope so. This whole article reads like some sort of marketing piece - 'scalability' is all very good, but what does it mean in practice? 86.135.68.65 (talk) 08:30, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

It means you don't have to worry about the details. -- samj _in^out 04:48, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Architecture

The Architecture section is not very informative, and seems to concentrate on introducing jargon more than on explaining architectural concepts. The reference to "Unix Philosophy" is particularly unhelpful. Rablewis (talk) 00:11, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Do you have any better suggestions as to how better to explain the component nature of cloud computing architectures? This was the best (well known) analogy that we could come up with and I personally think it does a good job of illustrating the concept. As unix has cat, grep, sed, awk etc. talking over pipes, cloud computing has storage, compute, queues, databases, etc. talking over http. -- samj _in^out 04:47, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Open source is required is a bit strong

"Open standards and open source software are also critical to the growth of cloud computing.[13]" is stated in the article at this time. While I do like and uses open source software, and think their are several benefits to that approach. It is by no means a requirement, except in a case where a customers has their own requirement to use open source infrastructure. Also the citation is to a blog where only an opinion that it is required, by no means a strong reference. 209.30.228.224 (talk) 04:14, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you aware of any public cloud infrastructure that does not use open source and/or open standards? -- samj _in^out 18:31, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Many large, retail clouds run on proprietary/closed source software: Amazon's cloud, IBM's Blue Cloud (IBM) and Microsoft's Azure (MSFT) for example all build their clouds with proprietary code; SaaS vendors Google Apps (GOOG) and SalesForce.com (CRM) similarly power their offerings with proprietary software. Even vendors who started with open software frequently, and sadly, do not release their modifications back to the community and thus are effectively using proprietary software. (GPLv3 section 13 specifically addresses the wide spread exploitation of this "server hole" in GPLv2). Given the widespread use of proprietary software, how about changing the wording to say "Open standards and open source software have been critical to the growth...".

"Open standards" (HTTP, SSL, TCP/IP), however, remain the backbone of cloud computing, public and private. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 23:48, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

It's certainly more reasonable to say that all cloud computing systems are based on Internet/Open standards but you're right, it's less sure for open source software. Amazon is based on Xen (open source), Blue Cloud too (+linux, hadoop, etc.). SalesForce moved to Linux and Google's always run on it. OTOH all of them have proprietary components and it could be argued that not enough is being done in terms of AGPL etc. -- samj _in^out 07:20, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Replace "Internet" with more general word "network" in lede?

Many vendors provide "private cloud" software and other organizations have developed their own private clouds. These resources meet the definition of cloud computing except that they are not deployed on the Internet, but instead use a private network. The lede would be well served by replacing the word "Internet" with the more general word "network". Thoughts? sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 23:19, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

The vast majority of references explicitly use the term "Internet" and some of them even explicitly exclude the possibility of internal/private clouds. I for one would strongly oppose such a change and am pretty sure this has been discussed (and rejected) previously. These things are essentially just virtualisation rebadged as "cloud" and they short-sell cloud computing - indeed many of the key features of cloud computing (perimeter free architecture, worldwide access, no peak load engineering, multi-tenant architecture/economies of scale, etc.) are simply impossible to replicate. That's not to stop someone going and writing about "private cloud" or "internal cloud" in another article of course, but previous attempts to do so weren't so successful - it probably doesn't help that virtually everyone pushing this terminology happens to have something to sell and a lot to lose from the success of cloud computing. -- samj _in^out 23:32, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Both linguistically and based on the key characteristics, "internal clouds" or "private clouds" seem still to be "clouds". Private clouds provide all of the key characteristics listed in the article. "Perimeter-free architecture" and "worldwide access" are characteristics not listed in the article; "worldwide access" is a feature of most private clouds (usually achieved using VPN software) but I'm not familiar with the term "Perimeter-free architecture". A pointer to the previous discussion of this topic would be appreciated. Thanks! sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 00:11, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Here and here some previous discussions on the topic. The point is that users do not connect to a service endpoint as such but "the cloud" (which usually means being routed to the closest next gen data center). There's some talk about security in the cloud here.

Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is "in the cloud", including conventional outsourcing.

Here is a typical quote on the subject and there are many like it, like this:

The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age... Thus, the new computing architecture scales across Earth's surface. Ironically, this emerging architecture is interlinked by the very technology that was supposed to be Big Computing's downfall: the Internet

And the following wording from [this] Pew Internet report:

Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web. Online users who take advantage of cloud applications say they like the convenience of having access to data and applications from any Web-connected device.

These are just a few examples from a quick search - indeed there are ~15,000,000 hits for "cloud computing" vs ~15,000 for for "internal cloud" and 4 of the top 5 hits for "private cloud" refer to this rocking bed. Here is a more specific handling of "private cloud":

That's an oxymoron since cloud computing, by definition, happens outside of the corporate data center, but it's the technology that's important here, not the semantics.

Maybe a footnote or small section on the topic representing this minority view would suffice... -- samj _in^out 07:05, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

The original suggestion was to replace the word "Internet" with "network" in the lede. The other terms (private/internal cloud) seem distracting. An archived disucussion does point out ZDNet's succinct and approachable definition of cloud computing which says in part ``Computing "in the cloud" may refer to a company's own network, but often refers to the Internet...". That seems like a more objective introduction for this article that includes both Internet and private network deployments. While many examples of cloud computing can be found on the Internet, many others are found within private networks.

The suggestion that cloud computing must "happen outside of the corporate data center" seems overly restrictive. For instance, Google's employees use Google Apps to run the business. They are still using cloud computing even though the computers are inside of Google's own corporate data center. The Internet is just one network, albeit a very large one, where cloud computing can be used. Replacing the word "Internet" with "network" in the current lede will improve this article. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 18:48, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

I think Google might be something of a special case here! Cloud computing technologies may be applicable to intranets (in much the same way as TCP/IP is applicable to LANs as well as WANs), but, IMHO, "cloud computing", as a paradigm, currently usually implies services provided via the Internet by external service providers. However, if reliable sources conflict on this point, then there is no right answer. Letdorf (talk) 21:04, 3 March 2009 (UTC).

For all intents and purposes Google corporate is just another Google Enterprise customer - they're remote from the data centers just like everyone else, and may well pay for access just like everyone else too. For now I'd change your statement above as follows: "While virtually all examples of cloud computing can be found on the Internet, some others are found within private labs".

The subject has popped up again a bit with the days-old release of VMware's vCloud... let's give it a bit and see where it goes from here. Oh, and by the way - what did you mean by your latest edits: "The services are accessible anywhere that the required networking infrastructure." -- samj _in^out 00:10, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

The special case seems more like the common case. Companies using cloud computing internally include Intel, Pixar, Boeing, Airbus, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, Caterpillar, NASA, NOAA, University of California, Oracle, Apple, Nike, Adidas, CERN and many more. Cloud vendors use their own clouds too including Yahoo!, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, EMC/VMWare and Netsuite. All use large internal clouds that are flexibly applied in a scalable fashion and accessed remotely using standardized protocols on the company's internal network by a variety of groups using web browsers within the company. While their infrastructure is not accessible from the public Internet, the employees still benefit from cloud computing. The lede should include cloud computing regardless of whether its on an internal network or the Internet. Replacing "Internet" in the lede with "network" would capture that. I do think that the "Internet" is the largest and most commonly referenced of all networks.

Re: my latest edits: they suffered from an "edito" (a sub-species of typo) and I've repaired it. Pre-edit mentioned worldwide, but network access is required and that only reaches about a quarter of the world's population. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 02:32, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Sorry I can't accept your assertion that customers of a virtualisation vendor who has just announced some tech bearing the "cloud computing" badge suddenly become "cloud computing" customers, especially when exactly zero of them are listed in the provided reference and I can't find any links between most of them and cloud computing (after dropping the cloud vendors) - this looks like a vendor prospects/pilot list.

It is questionable anyway that this use case goes even close to meeting the existing definitions (off-site, third party, accessed via internet, minimal skills required, web/web service based, minimal capex, reduced opex, 'infinite' scalability, etc.). Granted to some extent such vendors will be able to co-opt the definition (see updates in grey) but that doesn't mean we have to treat it as anything other than an alternative PoV or indeed fringe theory (e.g. "ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view"), especially when most of the noise is coming from said vendors whose existing businesses are threatened by the new model.

It's also questionable as to whether cloud vendors "eating their own dogfood" is at all notable - the car manufacturer down the road happens to have one brand in its employee car park too and guess who Fedex use to send packages? (incidentally the examples you cite *are* Internet accessible, and indeed accessed via the Internet). In any case, would your proposed redefinition be any different from, say, client-server? Letdorf and I have already been working towards a sensible definition that keeps all players happy and it's not so easy.

Your own unreliable sources that you used to equate "network computing" (an Oracle-ism) to "cloud computing" yesterday also concur with the mainstream view:

"The term ‘cloud computing’ encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers."

Given your insistence despite protests from two editors, consensus from various earlier discussions, lack of consensus here and my suggestion to "see where it goes", now would be a very good time for you to reveal any potential conflict of interest. I may have found some reliable sources to justify a mention but don't forget the law of unexpected consequences. -- samj _in^out 09:09, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Definition of Cloud Computing

The very first sentence of this article is "Cloud computing is Internet-based ("cloud") development and use of computer technology ("computing").", which is not correct - "cloud" in no way implies "internet". Go read a whole bunch of blogs on the subject and you'll realize that no-one can agree on a definition of Cloud Computing right now - whether its internet only, whether its end-user services eg. gmail or an app runtime environment eg. Amazon. My own personal interpretation of the term is more fuzzy - just being that the computation/storage is done remotely from the client by a large pool of computers, and that the load can move around between all of those computers transparently - this could include enterprize applications run in a private datacenter and accessed on a LAN. I also think that the source of the first few sentances of this article is rediculous - its an old article from 1999 (before anyone had through of Cloud Computing), and is about the reasons that people use a cloud-shape to represent the internet on diagrams (btw - people use cloud-shapes to represent LAN's, WAN's, SAN's, cellular-networks, etc. on diagrams) - it has nothing at all to do with cloud computing, and referencing it as a source for an article about cloud computing is just plain dumb. -- 192.197.128.19 (talk) 20:14, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, this article gives this definition of Cloud Computing: Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is "in the cloud," including conventional outsourcing.. That doesn't really sound like it is including intranet-based distributed computing. Also, the start of the article is trying to explain the origins of the term "cloud" in this context, so referring to network diagram conventions seems appropriate. Letdorf (talk) 16:19, 13 January 2009 (UTC).

Thanks, agreed - the origins of the 'cloud' are both important and relevant. It is also well accepted, except perhaps by purveyors of "I can't believe it's not cloud" systems, that cloud computing is intrinsically linked with 'Internet' - anything else is a poor approximation and today virtually all of the stuff being discussed is vaporware or confined to labs anyway while Google Apps (as one example of many) has over 10 million active users. -- samj _in^out 01:03, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Internet based 'development.... ? This description does not make much sense, for most people "cloud based" means you can run applications in your browser that actually run on servers on the Internet, and can also save your data there. As such the introduction sentence is really crappy to say the least. It obfuscates what Cloud Computing is really about. Mahjongg (talk) 15:22, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed... see the ongoing discussion below. Letdorf (talk) 15:40, 12 February 2009 (UTC).

The vast majority of topics falling under the 'cloud computing' moniker are developer APIs, components (storage, database, queues, etc.), development platforms (azure, appengine, force.com, etc.), raw compute power (amazon ec2, gogrid, etc.), etc. This is what cloud computing "is really about" - "run[ning] applications in your browser" is called Software as a Service and is just part of the cloud computing landscape.

Furthermore this is derived from the defintion of "computing" which is "development and use of computer technology". -- samj _in^out 17:40, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

For the vast majority of people "cloud computing" has just a single meaning, and it has nothing to do with "development", that is just obfuscating the issue for most people. for the vast majority cloud computing means running your applications "on the cloud", and storing your data "in the cloud", or to quote "Cloud computing is an idea that what makes up your "personal computer" - your desktop, your apps, and your data, - can live and run on the Internet instead of on your hard drive.". That is much more direct than all the techno-babble, here, and much more relevant to the normal users. All the obscure technical distractions are just that distractions. Sooner or later the definition of cloud computing has to follow mainstream usage. Just like the Application software article, there wont be any talk about its development, API's or Libraries, but what a software application does, with "Cloud computing" it will be the same, people are not concerned how applications for cloud are developed, but what "Cloud computing" means for them, and what the immediate consequences are of its existence for them. For a "no nonsense" mainstream description of cloud computing you might want to watch this youTube video [6] Mahjongg (talk) 20:21, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The term "cloud computing" usually refers to the "virtual hardware" layer where a vendor supplies virtualized hardware and some minimum set of software (for example Xen on ec² or Python on App Engine). Critically, the customer must then install, maintain and deploy their own software on-demand. A "cloud computing" customer still must employ their own software administrator(s) to manage the customer software.

In SaaS computing, on the other hand, the vendor employs the software administrator(s) to install, maintain and deploy all of the software. A SaaS vendor might possibly employ hardware administrators too depending on whether the SaaS vendor maintains their own hardware or uses someone else's "cloud".

Employment of software administrator's seems to be the Occam's razor that differentiates Cloud computing from SaaS. Web 2.0 implementations are deployed using SaaS and SaaS in turn is deployed using Cloud computing.

sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 01:48, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Any references for these definitions? Letdorf (talk) 10:21, 27 February 2009 (UTC).

• Unindented

The vast majority of references to "cloud computing" are either high level passing references in the context of discussions about e.g. Google Apps or Salesforce.com or (more often than not) discussion about cloud computing "under the covers". A good example supporting this is that Salesforce.com has always been the number 1 example of SaaS, while "Force.com is Cloud Computing for the Enterprise" (a developer only platform). Microsoft's horse in the cloud computing race is Azure - another developer only technology, and Google App Engine falles squarely under the "cloud computing" umbrella while Google Apps could be better classed SaaS (even if it sits on top of a cloud computing architecture).

In any case the "developer" component is by no means exclusive to the "user" component - indeed the disputed phrase, "development and use of computer technology", should keep both camps happy so this looks a lot like argument for the sake of it. -- samj _in^out 15:01, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

A couple of references in response to Letdorf's request:

Cloud Computing Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, Bill Whyman, ISI - International Strategy and Investing

IDC definition of Cloud Computing

Sourced from Tim O'Reilly and used in a presentation about Azure.

sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 19:44, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the distinction between infrastructure and application is important, but the problem is that the terminology used in your references isn't consistent: you and ISI refer to "cloud computing" and "SaaS", IDC talk about "cloud computing" and "cloud services", O'Reilly talks about "utility computing", "PaaS" and "cloud-based applications". Also I think it's fair to say there's more to cloud infrastructure that just virtualization.

I'm not sure what SamJ means by "developer only technology" - Windows Azure isn't a development environment, it's a cloud services platform! Such platforms may not be directly visible to users (in much the same way as the internals of an OS, or any other "back-end" software, aren't) but it would be misleading to refer to them as "developer" technologies. Letdorf (talk) 11:28, 3 March 2009 (UTC).

Take another look - Azure is of no interest whatsoever to users but the applications which use its components are; if one doesn't look at the components there's very little to say on the subject. It's very much a view of cloud computing as an "operating environment" of sorts, which is an increasingly popular view. -- samj _in^out 19:19, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Letdorf, yes, cloud computing ontology is inconsistent and an open area of discussion/research. Here are some references (along with some great diagrams) that are sorting out the naming:

* The most well researched appears to be Toward a Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing - Youseff, Butrico, DaSilva

* Cristofer Hoff has produced this very nice and well detailed diagram: Cloud Taxonomy & Ontology - Draft 1.4 - Hoff

* And finally Kent Langley created a very approachable diagram in April 2008, but it does not include IaaS/PaaS layering under SaaS: Cloud Computing: Get Your Head in the Clouds

sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 21:54, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

The reason these diagrams haven't (yet) appeared here is, as you say, they're original research. That and they're too technical. Accordingly we've gone as far as we can without crossing over into OR by breaking what we know is cloud computing into half a dozen categories. Until we have something universally accepted (like the OSI Stack) there's not much more we can do - I'm expecting to see something like this emerge from one of the various standards efforts in 6-12 months and be adopted within 12-24. -- samj _in^out 22:13, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

No original research applies to using Wikipedia to publish original research, but the Youseff2008 paper was published as part of Grid Computing Environments (GCE08). I've updated the citation to include the publication info and added a reference for the presentation version. The other two diagrams (Langley, Hoff) might violate WP:SPS (investigation needed), however, other references you've already allowed in this article are of similar quality and so I figured I would mention them anyway. The diagrams in the article might also fall under the WP:SPS policy too. Oh and on the complexity - the Youseff2008 diagram is pretty simple as is Langley's; I agree that the Hoff diagram seems pretty complicated at first glance, but the colors help. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 23:23, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

WP:SPS usually applies to sources written by the article subject - e.g. referencing a company web site, press release or interview in the same company's article to justify a statement like "XYZ is the biggest, baddest company in the industry". It's true that WP:OR applies to images which is exactly why we haven't been too creative as yet. As I say, when there's a consensus ontology we'll accept it but I think it's a while away yet... a lot of even the academic reports have been heavily criticised by the industry. The 3-layer SaaS, PaaS, IaaS option has got some traction but it doesn't go far enough while the others go too far. -- samj _in^out 02:06, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh and by the way, here's the policy. -- samj _in^out 02:08, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

I've been [re]reviewing these references today and it's interesting that IBM should be contributing to the paper given that the resulting diagram is rather incoherent (CaaS? DaaS? !?!?) and that they are actually using a stack almost identical to the one depicted in the article. -- samj _in^out 14:27, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Sun Microsystems?

In March 2006, Sun announced a Grid computing service that was very cloud-like and in many ways a precursor to what's happening in cloud today. Would this be worthy of mention in the History section? Russcastronovo (talk) 19:47, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Possibly, though if you're talking about network.com, that was recently pulled to undergo some sort of grid->cloud transition. -- samj _in^out 05:00, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

The service sun provided was indeed at network.com. It was a $1 per CPU per hour offering and wasn't particularly successful. It did, however, preceed Amazon's offering by a year or so. Would that make it worthy of a brief mention? 192.18.43.225 (talk) 21:01, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think so, at least not until it reappears (at which time it may well give Amazon a run for their money). -- samj _in^out 00:44, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

I think Network.com is certainly worth mentioning as one of the first cloud vendors in a historic sense at least as a pioneer. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 03:57, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

It was there when the system was live but not they've pulled it, presumably to move to xVM, the link went too. I don't feel too strongly about that either way. -- samj _in^out 04:37, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Criticism

Ok so it seems we get to have the 'criticism' discussion again. This section is a crap magnet and was previously removed with good reason - Stallman's view is already in the article too: "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes that cloud computing endangers liberties because users sacrifice their privacy and personal data to a third party.".

There has been vocal critisism for cloud computing both for its role as a marketing term with little substance or novelty, and in terms of the privacy issues involved with it. GNU pioneer Richard Stallman had this to say: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign."

Other major figures of the computer industry agreed, with Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation commenting that: "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

It's worth mentioning that the comments from both RMS and Ellison don't necessarily reflect the views of the community or Oracle respectively, and that oracle has since launched the 'Oracle Cloud Computing Center':

Continuing its pioneering role in shaping enterprise computing, Oracle is pleased to introduce new offerings that allow enterprises to benefit from the developments taking place in the area of Cloud Computing. As a part of our initial offering, Oracle has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment to offer the following products and services:

Deploy Oracle Software in the Cloud Backup Oracle Database in the Cloud

These offerings may be extended to other Cloud platforms in the future.

Please integrate legitimate criticisms into e.g. the key characteristics section. -- samj _in^out 13:29, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Removing sourced information this way is rarely a good idea. While the information gives what appears to be undue weight to these opinions, removing them completely is just as problematic. Can the information be incorporated more sparingly into other sections of the article? --Ronz (talk) 15:57, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Tell that to these guys. Anyway the RMS comment was already incorporated into the article before the section was added and the Ellison comment was largely BS when it was said and now not at all reflective of the company's position on cloud computing - people change their minds you know :)

Anyway my main problem is that sections like this instantly attract rubbish in much the same way as the 'new and improved' intro did. I'll integrate it when I have a spare second (unless you care to do it yourself) but life calls right now. -- samj _in^out 13:08, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

The Manual of Style doesn't like them either: {{criticism section}} -- samj _in^out 04:54, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

First use of a cloud picture

The first time I saw a picture of a "cloud" being used as an abstraction for a complex networked system was for the Public switched telephone network, so the concept of the picture of a "cloud" for an abstract network is far older than many might think. Mahjongg (talk) 23:34, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah it's been around for a while. I tried to find a good network diagram with a cloud to illustrate this point a while back, but there were none. As you can see I've finally created something a bit more suitable than the infamous "The Cloud" placeholder image. -- samj _in^out 04:36, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Risk mitigation undue weight flag

Opened this section for discussion of the undue weight flag added to the Risk mitigation section. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 03:57, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Cool, so the point was that the other sections are derived from almost 100 reasonably reliable sources and are somewhat of a consensus. This entire section is derived from one report/article. It's not to say we shouldn't have a section dealing with risks... just that we should try to find some consensus on the top issues e.g. privacy and security. I think I saw something like this in one of the IDG reports. There was talk of a criticism section (and I think one may have briefly existed) but we generally don't like {{criticism-section}}s. -- samj _in^out 03:53, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

OK, so it's mostly a request to insure that all of the risks are covered. While Wikipedia doesn't have two-sources rule like the NY Times, that sounds like good request. sn‾uǝɹɹɐʍɯ (talk) 04:05, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Essentially yes. Let's kick off a list of things to hunt for references for. -- samj _in^out 04:53, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

• Security (including availability?)
• Performance (including availability?)
• Privacy
• Governance and Regulatory Compliance

I am in a panel discussion on cloud computing security at this moment, and the Gartner study was cited by one of the panelists. I have also seen it cited elsewhere. So, I believe it is a trustworthy source. I do not think undue weight is given to this section. User:Jeremycec

Have removed the template but let's take another look at the section when time permits. -- samj _in^out 20:10, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

SAP Business ByDesign

SAP Business ByDesign is an On-Demand, fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that targets business software requirements of small and medium sized enterprises (SME). [1] It is complete Software as a Service (SaaS) offering from SAP AG based at Walldorf, Germany —Preceding unsigned comment added by Imtiyazali4all (talk • contribs) 08:08, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi there. Thanks for that explanation and for trying (yet again) to insert the link into this article. Here's the thing: this article is to tell people what cloud computing is, not advertise services. For most people that means Google. For more advanced people it means Salesforce, and for nerds it means Amazon. For nobody does it mean "SAP Business ByDesign" so giving it as an example serves no purpose but to advertise your product. Please take a look at WP:COI. -- samj _in^out 23:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Disadvantages

There should be a thorough discussion of the disadvantages of cloud computing. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I do have a lot of experience with managing large networks of loosely-coupled distributed computing resources. (I ran ZoneEdit, and dot-GOV, and primebroker.com and some other pretty big sites).

At the very least a "disadvantages" section should be added, with content requested.

Namely:

• Lack of connectivity causes 100% downtime, whereas with traditional applications, lack of connectivity allows for some local function to continue until connectivity is restored.

• The lack of industry-wide standards means that a usage surge can easily overwhelm capacity without the ability to push that usage to another provider

• Companies providing computing services will over-sell these services similar to how bandwidth is over-sold based on average or "peak" usage, instead of "maximum" usage. ISP's typically operate at multiples of 5 to 1, where they sell 5 times more than they have in capacity, assuming users will not use more than 20% of their allotted resources. This works, until there is a popular YouTube video that everyone wants to see at the same time.... resulting in outages. Cloud computing is even more vulnerable to the peak-usage problem than internet bandwidth.

• "Denial of service" attacks, currently common, become easier. What's more they become harder to trace, as compromised "cloud resources" can be leveraged to launch the attacks, rather than compromised "individual pc's".

• Cloud computing is vulnerable to massive security exploits. Currently, when a system is broken into, only the resources of that system are compromised. With cloud computing, the damages caused by a security breach are multiplied exponentially

• By "centralising" services, cloud computing increases the likelihood that a systems failure becomes "catastrophic", rather than "isolated".

Simultaneous (talk) 15:59, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Cloud Computing Economics picture

Is it just me or does this picture make no sense? The way I read it is that for any given number of users I'm going to have a variable cost due to the cloud service, fixed traditional infrastructure cost (which is decreasing as a function of users, why?), and a variable traditional infrastructure cost. I imagine this picture is supposed to illustrate two separate cases: 1) "traditional IT" with fixed infrastructure and variable infrastructure cost, and 2) cloud computing with only variable infrastructure cost. I think the core of this problem is that the areas between the curves are named and shaded, when in reality it's the curves themselves that should be named. There should be four curves in this picture and no shaded areas: 1) fixed traditional IT costs, 2) variable traditional IT costs, 3) total traditional IT costs (1+2), and 4) cloud costs.--130.233.154.94 (talk) 12:26, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

It seems you're upset because there's no fixed costs listed for cloud computing, which is because they're negligible and the message anyway is the shift from capex (+opex) to opex. But you're right about what the picture is supposed to illustrate - it's worked well for other audiences so I can only assume you are the exception - I don't see how removing the shading and adding another line would help. In any case the figures are referenced at File:Cloud_computing_economics.svg. -- samj _in^out 23:58, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I have no problem with cloud computing not having fixed costs represented. The picture uses shading and labeling to indicate that the areas between the curves related to the various values. Look at the dark red area, "Fixed Costs", it is not fixed but instead decreases as a function of users. The core problem is that it is not the areas between the curves, but the curves themselves that represent the various values. I will fix it when I have the time.--82.130.34.126 (talk) 08:49, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

I think the main problem with this diagram is that it is skewed and very pro-cloud. Why is the diagram cut off on the right side? This is clearly to depict cloud as the best option. Why is OpEx the same for dedicated h/w as for the cloud, when it should be lower for ded h/w (which result in cloud costs surpassing dedicated at some number of users)? The blue (cloud) area starts from zero, but where do you find a cloud provider with actually zero startup cost? And yes, the shaded areas add to the confusion, as the AREA seem to imply a total cost (which it is not) - there should be exactly 2 lines on this diagram (one for ded, one for cloud), nothing else.

85.225.9.160 (talk) Magmatrix —Preceding undated comment added 08:03, 29 May 2009 (UTC).

Btw, and why would CapEx decrease with number of users (as you say, and as the diagram shows in the red area)? Decreases PER USER, yes, but that is not what the diagram is showing - it shows a total cost, not a per-user cost. Or does the lower red area show cost per-user and the upper cost total? mixing apples and pears in the same diagram? No, this diagram makes no sense.85.225.9.160 (talk)Magmatrix —Preceding undated comment added 08:28, 29 May 2009 (UTC).

The Times vs. The London Times

From this editor's point of view, "The London Times" should be used to avoid ambiguity. According to the Wikipedia page about The London Times: "The Times is the original "Times" newspaper, lending its name to many other papers around the world, such as The New York Times, The Times of India, The Straits Times, The Times of Malta and The Irish Times. For specificity it is sometimes referred to as the London Times or The Times of London."--Bkengland (talk) 18:24, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

This article needs EXAMPLES badly

Really--the intro for this article is very vague. I'm not a novice computer user by any stretch of the imagination and I think I do a pretty good job of keeping up with current technology. What I'm saying is I actually had to READ the article--I should be able to get an idea of what cloud computing is from the first two sentences. Ideally sentence one defines it, sentence two is an example as necessary--here it is very necessary.

Worse still, I go to read the article, and I get down to "Brief", and from the first section, instead of getting an explanation of what cloud computing is, I get a list of things that it might be confused with.

Consider some serious revision for clarity--sacrifice the technical details in the beginning for some much-needed examples of how someone would interact with a cloud computing service. Instead of reading this article, I went elsewhere on the Internet and read up on cloud computing, and I think I have an idea of what it is, but I can't provide an example.

Would someone be willing to add one? STufaro (talk) 01:08, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Intro

So, which is the better first sentence for this article?

"Cloud computing is a term which is used to refer to the use of scalable, real-time, Internet-based information technology services and resources."

or:

"Cloud computing is Internet ("cloud") based development and use of computer technology ("computing")."

Letdorf (talk) 10:31, 16 January 2009 (UTC).

The first one is about SOA+utility computing, and the second one doesn't say anything at all... "The key distinction [between cloud and utility] ends up being around changes in the way you architect software, and changes in the way you architect the work being done." --Russ Daniels Tdanecker (talk) 11:15, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay.... so Mr Daniels says cloud computing is like utility computing, but "architected differently". Should that affect the introductory sentence in this article? Letdorf (talk) 13:27, 20 January 2009 (UTC).

The original (second) definition is at least accurate, if lacking in precision. The proposed replacement is incorrect in that cloud computing does not have to be scalable (but it often is) nor real-time (think batch jobs). A good deal of time and effort went into boiling the many definitions into one compatible consensus view and this was the (generally accepted) result.

Here are a handful of references that "based+development+and+use+of+computer+technology" approve of this definition:

• Cloud Computing Begins to Gain Traction on Wall Street
• The difference between Cloud Computing and SaaS
• Is the Enterprise Ready for Cloud Computing?
• Soonr brings cloud computing to the iPhone
• Cloud Computing Technology Providers and Contributors in 2008-2009
• http://www.cyop.net/cloud_computing.html
• Windows Azure: A clear perspective on cloud computing

Please talk first rather than reverting reverts in future, but feel free to expand on the base definition using the best references you can find (extracting signal from the noise can be difficult). -- samj _in^out 20:13, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Oops - I just realised the definition wasn't referenced... it is now. -- samj _in^out 20:19, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're saying here - are you claiming that the validity of a definition given in a WP article can be measured by the number of journalists who are lazy enough to cut'n'paste from said article?! I'm sorry, but the phrase Internet ("cloud") based development and use of computer technology ("computing") is far too vague a definition, IMHO. Lots of "computer technology" is developed and/or used via the Internet, but little of it could be considered "cloud computing", even in the most general sense. For instance, is downloading a file by FTP or accessing a remote CVS repository "cloud computing"? Both would fit that definition.

This is a recurrent discussion, but yes, from a user-centric PoV if they can consume raw (FTP, eg CloudNAS) or 'enhanced' (CVS) storage without having to concern themselves with the inner workings then sure it fits; finally we're starting to look at computing from the user's point of view rather than having technology for the sake of technology. -- samj _in^out 12:04, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

When I mentioned FTP or CVS, I meant the kinds of things people were using the Internet for more than 20 years ago; before "Web 1.0", never mind "Web 2.0". That was still "Internet-based development and use of computer technology". Letdorf (talk) 00:28, 24 January 2009 (UTC).

The "scalable" and "real-time" qualifiers came from the InfoWorld article I cited, which seemed like a pretty good introduction to the subject Letdorf (talk) 21:28, 20 January 2009 (UTC).

If it's that good a resource then add it to the external links, and refine the base definition accordingly. I maintain that neither real-time nor scalable are requisites for cloud computing but that's not to stop them being used as examples. -- samj _in^out 12:04, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Furthermore, of the two references now given for the current first sentence, one explicitly quotes this article(!), and the other is dated January 6 this year, so is highly likely to have been a cut'n'paste from this article. Indirect self-references are obviously not valid references! (see WP:RS). Letdorf (talk) 21:46, 20 January 2009 (UTC).

The articles were selected because they assessed/validated the definition rather than just regurgitating it. In any case I've added a whitepaper on the subject which goes into more detail. Given the InfoWorld article predates most of the discussion around the definition, more recent articles better reflect the consensus of the community. -- samj _in^out 12:04, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

So now there are three refs for the opening statement; they're all dated December 2008 or January 2009, contain phrases that are suspiciously similar to this article around the same dates and hence are almost certainly indirect self-references. These are fundamentally wrong by the rules of WP! Letdorf (talk) 00:28, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Ok so I've gone over the article and references again and while not an absolute requirement I agree that some reference to "agile, scalable infrastructure", real-time scalability, etc. is useful so I've expanded the intro paragraph accordingly. I hope you are more satisfied with the result now. -- samj _in^out 12:31, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay, to recap, in the absence of any further objection, I'm proposing deleting the first sentence (apart from the obvious "Cloud computing is...") on the grounds that (a) it doesn't really add anything to the current first paragraph and (b) as I say above, the references given appear to be indirect self-references. Letdorf (talk) 17:17, 28 January 2009 (UTC).

The first sentence defines cloud computing; the remainder expands on that definition. You may not like that it's a broad definition, but at least it is accurate; your proposal (real-time, scalable, etc.) is clearly and demonstrably not. As I explained to you above, the three references are not self references but I'll copy the relevant parts here so you can see for yourself:

• "Here's why cloud computing — loosely defined as Internet-based development and use of computer technology — has a future and the likely reason why Ellison doesn't like it: Cloud-based services so far are cheaper than traditional IT products, such as large in-house databases."

• "Answers to the most complicated computing tasks are found in the clouds. Not the clouds in the sky that shower rain but clouds that deliver a super computing power on the internet. Cloud computing is the development and use of computer technology using the internet."

• "Cloud computing refers to the use of Internet-based (i.e. Cloud) computer technology for a variety of services (including storage capacity, processing power, business applications or components)."

The intro has been discussed to death already and we've finally found something that's been stable for months, except that every once in a while someone wanders in and insists on foisting their narrow view on the rest of us. Enough already. -- samj _in^out 00:58, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, the intro has been discussed here and here and here and here and here so you can see why I'm bored already... no offense. -- samj _in^out 01:03, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not really interested in foisting any narrow view on anybody; I'm quite willing to debate whether "real-time" or "scalable" or anything else are defining attributes of cloud computing. What I am interested in is trying to improve an opening sentence that gives a near-meaningless definition which doesn't distinguish cloud computing from pretty much anything you would use the Internet for, and a bunch of supporting references which appear to me to have used this very article as their own source.

Having said that, the somewhat different definition you quote from page 4 of the Micro Focus white paper is rather more specific and does seem at least partly original - IMHO, this would be a better one to use. Letdorf (talk) 12:45, 2 February 2009 (UTC).

Wait, you guys cannot be serious - this is somehow better than what was there before? Software Applications? Mobile Enterprise? WTF?:

Cloud computing is the use of computer data storage, central processing units, business applications, web applications or software applications, via the Internet, as well as software development tools and associated software architecture components like message queues. It is a style of computing in which typically real-time, scalable resources are provided "as a service" over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure ("in the cloud") that supports them. Mobile enterprise is cloud computing for business.

I changed the first sentence to a very light paraphrasing of the third quote User:SamJohnston has given above, which I considered to be an improvement on the previous sentence - see here. User:CloudComputing then attempted to expand this and give another ref shortly afterwards. I assumed SamJohnston would have no objections to me using the quote he himself provided on this talk page, but I agree CloudComputing's additions [7] probably don't clarify matters much. Letdorf (talk) 17:17, 8 February 2009 (UTC).

It seems there were a few different accounts involved, but the problem is that as soon as anyone starts listing anything in this article those of us who maintain it end up spending half our lives reverting additions - within a day or two that list would have grown to 10 or 15 items. You show me a more precise definition than 'internet based development and use of computer technology' and I'll show you an example of something that doesn't fit. -- samj _in^out 00:06, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, let's try that again without the list:

Cloud computing refers to the use of Internet-based (i.e. Cloud) computer technology for a variety of services.

This is marginally more precise and is copied verbatim from the quote you gave above. By the way, ...spending half our lives reverting additions pretty much sums up my experience of being a Wikipedian too. However, making one editor's life easier isn't a good justification for attempting to stymie other editors' efforts to improve an article. WP:OWN and WP:NVC have some words of wisdom on this. Letdorf (talk) 14:13, 9 February 2009 (UTC).

I strongly agree with Letdorf. "If you do not want your ideas (for article organization, categorization, style, standards, etc.) challenged or developed by others, then do not submit them" --Emre Kenci (talk) 16:05, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Did you actually read the thread? Anyway I see you've broken the intro again this afternoon - so long as we're talking minutiae about appropriate use of parenthesis and square quotes how about you tell me where it says you can have parentheses without leading spaces? -- samj _in^out 23:04, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

You're right it does not say that anywhere so instead of calling you an abuser like you did, I corrected it. I didnt read the whole threat but I read this part: "WP:OWN and WP:NVC have some words of wisdom on this." by Letdorf. And I still strongly agree with that. --Emre Kenci (talk) 12:14, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you guys having fun yet? The intro's a !#$%@( mess again. -- samj _in^out 03:38, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

The current first sentence of the intro comes from one of the quotes you have cited above, in support of the previous version. Surely you're not objecting to that? I could probably come up with something better, but I decided to compromise, given your intransigence over previous attempts to improve the intro. By the way, have you read WP:CIVIL? Letdorf (talk) 00:20, 23 February 2009 (UTC).

Never mind, I already cleaned it up -- samj _in^out 17:00, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I've been pondering over the WP:LEAD and have discussed it with a few colleagues... the previous version (which was in place without incident for months) is more informative than the current "for a variety of services" wording and as such has been replaced. -- samj _in^out 04:45, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

The place to discuss making changes to this article is here. Consensus in Wikipedia is built among WP editors, not among one editor and his mates! Letdorf (talk) 18:17, 28 February 2009 (UTC).

These "mates" happen to include some of the most active people in the cloud computing commmunity and until such time as I can convince them to get involved I am their only representation here. In any case, proposing such a controversial edit to a stable article and then implementing it in the absence of consensus is not on. -- samj _in^out 15:08, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Regardless of the activities of your acquaintances, this is at best original research. Controversial? This time I deliberately used a quote (verbatim) and a source you had given previously in this discussion, in an attempt to be as un-controversial as possible! It's obvious you have no real interest in building consensus here. Letdorf (talk) 15:26, 1 March 2009 (UTC).

It's well sourced so hardly original research and there have been two people outside of us contribute to this discussion over six weeks - one wanted to talk about quotes and parenthesis and the other provided a quote that talked about software architecture (e.g. development). I see that as an indication that it's a non-issue for most people and that we would be better to focus our energies elsewhere. Status quo reflects the views of both users and developers while suggested alternatives ignore the latter. -- samj _in^out 05:24, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I seem to have inadvertently stepped into a sh*t storm by removing the first sentence. My rationale for removing it was that it's a completely vacuous sentence, and I'm not sure it's even grammatically correct. In any case, it starts out by "Cloud computing is ..." leading me to believe that what follows is a definition of what cloud computing is. Instead I'm told that it is something that is: 1) "Internet based", and 2) a "use of computer technology". That definition matches about a million different terms and tells me nothing of value. It also sets the whole tone of the article as a lackluster soup of marketing terms. I was reverted as "per talk page", but I fail to see any consensus for it here. Instead I see a number of people expressing concerns over the intro in general and the first sentence in particular, and one editor who is disregarding everyone else's arguments.--130.233.154.94 (talk) 12:44, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, as you can see, I've been trying to persuade User:SamJohnston for some time now with the same argument, but to no avail. A clear case of WP:OWN it seems to me. Letdorf (talk) 13:00, 23 March 2009 (UTC).

Remind me again why the definition needs to be any more concise, particularly in the absence of a formal definition (and indeed an authorative body with which to create one)? There was no precise definition for the last paradigm shift, client-server, and there need not be here either. If anything this is simply client-server->client-cloud; the shifting of "computing" to the Internet. The assumption is that "cloud" is things like Amazon EC2, which is definitely not the case; most deployments (google, salesforce, etc.) have no virtualisation whatsoever, and yet we talk about this in the lead which is at least a partial concession to Letdorf's demands (above). -- samj _in^out 07:34, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

User:130.233.154.94 has explained it pretty well above; there's no point in me trying to spell it out yet again. And I see User:Eleven even seems to have been of the same opinion, but as usual, their contribution has been reverted. So, to recap, in the last few months, myself, Tdanecker, 130.233.154.94 and Eleven even seem to broadly agree that the first sentence of this article is poor, but our opinions don't seem to count here, apparently. You even slapped a Template:uw-vandal on 130.233.154.94 for their troubles, which is well out of order. And whether virtualisation is an intrinsic part of cloud computing is a different debate; what we're talking about here is trying to write meaningful English. Letdorf (talk) 10:47, 27 March 2009 (UTC).

Here's the Wall Street Journal's latest definition which is hours old (The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud -- Whatever That May Mean). Thanks for the ongoing WP:HOUNDing though - good to see nothing's changed. -- samj _in^out 10:50, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

In its broadest sense, cloud computing describes something apparent to anybody who uses the Internet: Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else -- "in the clouds" -- and brought back to your screen.

That is an exceptionally bad definition, and the WSJ is not the right source to look for one. It's like starting Shoe with: "Shoes are collections of atoms." I don't know what kind of conspiracy you think there is against you, but I was simply trying to do my small part to fix an obviously bad first sentence of the article. There are many, many problems with the article as a whole, but apparently nobody is allowed to fix any of them.--130.233.238.136 (talk) 13:35, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually for the average person this is what cloud means, and in any case it's the most reliable source we have. Some people (above) think of it as scalable infrastructure, virtualisation, etc. but the reality is that for the vast majority cloud = Google. For the advanced cloud = Salesforce and for nerds (above) it means Amazon. Is Gmail a "dynamically scalable and often virtualised resource provided as a service"? Clearly not. -- samj _in^out 00:03, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Google, Salesforce, Amazon or Gmail are not clouds. Three of those are companies, one is a free email service.--130.233.154.94 (talk) 10:57, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Are you arguing for my case or against it? -- samj _in^out 11:48, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

I have no idea what your case is. The old first sentence was bad, the current is acceptable.--130.233.154.94 (talk) 13:13, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Layperson's impression of the page: Utterly incomprehensible. Wikipedia should make these esoteric ideas understandable to someone without any IT background at all, such as myself. I would even think that that's the fun part.Archer070 (talk) 19:48, 15 May 2009 (UTC)Archer070

After reading the first few pages of the article (and noting that there is a lot of ongoing discussion in this "Introduction" thread, I must agree with Archer070 (as the latest commenter) that this article needs a lot of attention and improvement. However, given the state of the discussion, I'm not sure I should. Is anybody attempting to organize a coordinated effort re this? --Bkengland (talk) 21:19, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Full of Inaccuracies. No criticisms section. Gives credibility to what is in effect a buzzword.

The first and most major inaccuracy is the implication that "cloud computing" is not simply a continuation of the attempt to sell consumers dumb terminals through which they buy services.

The first technical inaccuracy is a huge one. The statement "Up to the 1990s, data circuits (including those that carried Internet traffic) were hard-wired between destinations" is untrue on its face. The first data networks were wireless (depending on how you define a data network). The first public data networks were packet and email based packet networks run through traditonal phone lines.

A more seriously disengenuous inaccuracy is in this statement "The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to 1960, when John McCarthy opined that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility". This was the mainrame philosophy that the pc revolution put the stake through the heart of. The way this is stated simply rewrites history. The article in effect credits individuals with things they did not intend as well as granting this concept a history it does not have.

The most important inaccuracy in this article is the very concept behind cloud computing. It is an esoteric concept and a hard one to define but it is most certainly not one in which the public is seen merely as consumer to be charged. A more useful definition might remove the business centric focus and explain it more around examples like bittorrent, emule, and the seti@home project. Even more accurately cloud computing should perhaps be put forth as a buzzword or perhaps to be more politic - reimagining, of an old concept.

I did not edit this article as i am certain some here would object strongly and have put a lot of work into this page but this entry should be cleaned up or wiped. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Creid999 (talk • contribs) 12:30, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Christ al-friggin-mighty. Who would have guessed that the industry best known for its overbearing and insufferable use of stupid metaphors and clumsy jargon would come up with yet another doozy, and then load up the Wiki page that pretends to explain what it means with MORE crappy metaphors and jargon. Elastic? Scalable? What the F-ing bloody hades are we talking about here, a rubber wall for kids to climb at birthday parties? Oh, and thank Gartner for contributing his two cents. Next time someone could point out why his two cents are worth more than my five year old neice's. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.150.91.10 (talk) 11:43, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Use of survey as source

As of 2009, new players, such as Ubuntu Cloud Computing, are gaining attention in the industry.

I've moved the above here for discussion. As I indicated in my edit summary when I first removed it [8], I think the source is very poor and too much of it is original research. --Ronz (talk) 17:23, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Cloud computing brought to you by Gartner INC !

ok, I'm not being nice, but that's what I read when I read the article, I came here in the discussion thinking, someone has got to have made a comment about that phrase, it makes me think, what, that gartner company defines stuff ? sounds like original research but also, since when does wikipedia let businesses define stuff ? plugging themselves -this- shamelessly ? wikipedia@domn.net207.253.74.149 (talk) 16:16, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

This is a reference to the risks section, which was just removed. It didn't seem to me that we were handing all of Cloud Computing over to Gartner, however the appropriate reference was missing. I don't agree with the edit summary of WP:FRINGE that was used to remove this section. It wasn't a fringe theory. There were legitimate points raised that aren't covered in the recent rewrite of the Criticism intro. I would prefer to tag the section with {{Citation needed}} or look for the ref mentioned. Per the {{criticism section}} tag just added, perhaps much of that intro should go into an expanded risks section instead. UncleDouggie (talk) 21:33, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Gobbledygook

This page is a mass of useless gobbledygook to the average user ...who is in the vast majority of people. We are not interested in how many big words you know...we only want a reasonable explanation of what a computing cloud is. 24.145.62.13 (talk) 03:31, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

My quest to discover what cloud computing is.

From what I can gather, from the overly verbose articles I have read. Cloud computing is a group of computers that share each others processing downtime.

Think of it as a socialist system for CPU's.

Any one computer in the collective can access and use the at-rest time of any and all other CPUs in the collective.

One small anomaly is the capitalist company that pirates and sells the at CPU rest time of the host collectives computers.

Amazon is one example I have discovered that sells the CPU time that it captures in the wild.

Look! here's a packet I just grabbed as it entered my computer.

server216-137-33-247.iad2.cloudfront.net

OrgName: Amazon.com, Inc. OrgID: AMAZON-4 Address: 605 5th Ave S City: SEATTLE StateProv: WA PostalCode: 98104 Country: US

Hey! Its from Amazon, and its coming from Seattle....who else do I know in Seattle?

Is this legal? I mean is it O.K. for a company to cast its net out over the internet and find and sell the idle time of just anyones' computer. I know, they say you don't have to know how it works...just go ahead and use it.Khargar (talk) 20:20, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Clarity / Grammar

I find this sentence (in the History Section)confusing:

As VMs can be spawned on any given computer as conditions demand, they are location in-specific as well, much like a cloud network. Could you clarify location in-specific? LisaFrancis (talk) 03:58, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I wonder if "location agnostic" would be better (while remaining accurate to the original intent)? --Bkengland (talk) 19:31, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Why not keep it simple and just delete the phase which seems a bit of a repeat: As VMs can be spawned on any given computer as conditions demand, they are much like a cloud network. LisaFrancis (talk) 08:55, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Or remove the entire sentence, with descriptions covered in the VM article, which we should be cross referencing anyway. I'll go ahead and make this change, and I guess we'll see how this washes subsequently. Sound good? --Bkengland (talk) 21:20, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

sorry, I was travelling, yes, I agree and that is better LisaFrancis (talk) 04:04, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Please define "SaaS" (Software-as-a-Service) at the first (of six) places this term appears in the article. Perhaps provide link to Wikipedia page about SaaS Senor Mouse (talk) 14:23, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

United States budget and cloud computing

This stuff (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_fy2009/m09-20.pdf) from Peter Orszag explicitly states as guidance to federal agencies that: "Information Technology. Your submission should support the President’s priorities for information technology, including transparency, participation and collaboration, and improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness, in areas like cloud computing, by building upon efforts undertaken in 2009 and planned for 2010. Your IT portfolio should reflect updated cost estimates for all IT investments and balance new and ongoing investments within the context of your overall budget."

While generally I would classify cloud computing as a fad (or else, as BS), there's a healthy dose of business rationale behind it: we'll be forced to pay huge rents to software companies, who will have control over pricing. Apart from a small note mentioning Stallman's words there are no significant sections on disadvantages. And before anyone says to me to be bold, must say that cannot edit the article altogether (is it transcluded or whatever?) 212.188.108.54 (talk) 16:01, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Refer to:

We need to present a balanced view but keep it neutral. Criticism sections tend not to be neutral, hence "key characteristics" (which can be positive, negative or both). -- samj _in^out 14:20, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Types: North Korean Cloud - ?

Someone's political attempt at humor? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.234.123.121 (talk) 20:17, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

lol. looks like it's been removed already. -- samj _in^out 14:21, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Huh???

The first two sentences of this article include the words or phrases "provision" "dynamically scalable" "virtualised resources" "utility basis" "conceptual" "paradigm shift" and "abstracted". I am a very smart person. I want to know what Cloud Computing is. I have no freaking idea at all what any of this means. Please help make this article accessable - I would do it myself, but I still have no freaking clue what Cloud Computing is--CastAStone/^{/₵₳$↑₳₴₮ʘ№€} 22:56, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank You. I couldn't agree more. 842U (talk) 19:12, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Ironically I agree with you both... to the unwashed masses "cloud" simply means "out there on the Internet" (consider the Sidekick debacle which was nothing like a "real" cloud architecture and yet which was widely reported as "cloud"). Furthermore cloud need not be scalable, virtualised (services like Amazon EC2 are in the minority compared to e.g. Google, Yahoo!, etc.), utility billed (most of it's free!) or any of the other things it's often associated with. If we look at the history of the cloud itself, it was introduced by telcos in network diagrams to denote "stuff you don't have to care about" (where previously users had to deal with every single link and node). -- samj _in^out 21:16, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Good Article/Featured Article Status

I'd rather like to see if we can tidy up this article and get it to Good Article or even Featured Article status. It's been repeatedly tagged recently as {{tech jargon}} despite my efforts to make it more approachable for your average Wikipedia user. Furthermore efforts to "ring-fence" the term have failed and as evidenced by the Sidekick debacle, for the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia readers "cloud" simply means "out there on the Internet". As a result we're getting back to basics and leaving the more complex details to the experts. Anyway, please let me know if you're interested in helping out either here or by email. Cheers. -- samj _in^out 16:19, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea! 842U (talk) 19:12, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Cool. You're welcome to help out if you like. There was a great article in the Economist last week that gives a good layman's overview of cloud computing: Clash of the clouds... probably as good a starting point as ever and we'll struggle to find a more reliable source. -- samj _in^out 10:38, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I was able to read that entire article and not get lost, and not have anything in the article contradict my layman's understanding of cloud computing. And clearly, if the Economist article is true, then more and more people will arrive at the Wikpedia article looking for an understanding of 'the cloud.' It may be that this article just needs some crucial introductory information before it 'descends' into the minutiae of how and what 'cloud computing' consists of. Hopefully this is constructive feedback.842U (talk) 22:56, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

It's not simple wikipedia but it needs to be approachable, so we need to find a balance. It's also worth noting that there are many conflicting views, ranging from "anything out there" to a fine grained set of tests as to what's in and what's not... see my tongue-in-cheek flowchart for some of the characteristics that have been suggested as litmus tests. -- samj _in^out 00:18, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there a way to say this in a more straightforward way: Technically it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet. ?? 842U (talk) 21:06, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Virtualisation is not really relevant in most cases - e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and even most of Amazon's services... even scalability is more of a side effect than an absolute requirement (consider the company with a static 100 users - they can still benefit from cloud but never need scalability). The key thing is the outsourcing component - like when the cloud was first introduced to denote services provided by telcos that displaced privately run WANs. -- samj _in^out 23:39, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That article made a lot more sense than the wikipedia one. It would be best to explain cloud computing as an expansion of a client-server model which most people are familiar with or can be quickly explained. That is all cloud computing essentially is. The big difference is the architectural model is more complex (although the definition is vague enough to label a single server and client that do web-email as cloud computing). I would say the problem with the article actually stems from the vagueness of what cloud computing actually is. 64.148.241.133 (talk) 08:05, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

It's true that cloud computing is like client-server, but is it useful to make the comparison? The main difference is that the "server" is the cloud, which appears as a single endpoint. -- samj _in^out 23:39, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Nonsense

The article is written as if by a specialist for a specialist. Hence, it's not useful. Worse, it's useless. 842U (talk) 00:03, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Welcome back from your block 842U. Are we going to be constructive this time round or are we just trolling again? -- samj _in^out 12:14, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I have to agree with 842U, this article doesn't use much real computing terminology to define the actual mechanisms of cloud computing. It's very difficult to decide the relationship between cloud computing and other client/server paradigms with this article the way it is. It uses a lot of poorly-defined jargon to try defining cloud computing and spends more space than is useful on the effects of cloud computing, which makes it seem like it's appealing to businesses. If anything, this article makes cloud computing sound like it should be added to List of corporate jargon. Essentially: needs more science. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Willhig (talk • contribs) 04:13, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. 842U (talk) 21:00, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Agree, this reads like nonsense corporate jargon sprinkled with unexplained abstraction. No way a layman could get any use out of the article. 64.148.241.133 (talk) 07:53, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

The article about IQ clearly states that 50% of population has 2 digit IQ and will have similar difficulties with all articles not written in simple english so not-getting-it on the "normal english" Wikipedia is not an issue. --B-D (talk) 11:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

This article on cloud computing is poorly written. It has nothing to do with a reader's IQ. It has to do with the ability of the writer to convey the information in the simplest terms. Ergo, it is the writer who is lacking in talent/IQ and not the reader. You can compare two math books and you will see: most people can't understand higher math because the guy writing it can't understand how to convey information in simplest terms. The goal is understanding and not obfuscation or worse, to show how 'smart' the writer must be. If the writer can't clearly explain what cloud computing is in 25 words or less, the writer shouldn't be writing about it.Malke 2010 (talk)

At Wikipedia we comment on the content, not the contributor - is it really necessary to say things like "it is the [unpaid volunteer] writer who is lacking in talent/IQ" to get your point about the article across? No. This is not the simple english wikipedia so we don't have to cater only to the lowest common denominator - many of the people reading/contributing to the article are IT professionals. The subject (under the covers at least) is quite complex and if you look at articles like DNA sequencing it is clearly not unusual to have technically complex articles on Wikipedia. -- samj _in^out 14:34, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Over-centralisation is evil

Here, the power lies again in the hands of few... People are stupid enough to choose to be too lazy to cognatively grasp the tools that they use. In the end it is not just understanding but free will that we will lose. 155.42.123.70 (talk) 15:47, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with all of the above. I am a very smart person and this article makes no sense to me whatsoever. I have no clue what the first paragraph means, and having read the responses above, apparently the first paragraph is completely false as well as meaningless.

I disagree that stupid or lazy people using tools built by smart people leads to the loss of free will. How many people understand how a cell phone or a light switch works? But did either the cell phone or electricity lead to a loss of free will? No. (Whether the development of triangulation systems for 911 calls from cell phones leads to the growth of Big Brother is another issue. OnStar is now bragging that they can turn your car off remotely.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.248.147.128 (talk) 18:54, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree that the first paragraph doesn't tell you much. I am still not sure how cloud computing differs from the old client-server set up of the old mainframe era especially in the light of the recent Microsoft Danger fiasco where the cloud going down had exactly the same effect as a mainframe connected to a "smart" client going down. The liability issues of such a system have already come up with Kindle with Amazon using its cloud to enforce Copyright law and getting so much bad PR that they promised never to do that again.--BruceGrubb (talk) 16:10, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

While you're absolutely right about the need to tread carefully, this isn't really an appropriate forum for discussing personal opinions about technology. Please try to focus on how this energy can be channeled towards improving the article. -- samj _in^out 21:59, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I am not discussing Personal feelings but the concerns of reliable sources: InfoWorld ("The dangers of cloud computing" Jul 7, 2008), Richard Stallman (Sep 29, 2008, "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder"), BusinessWeek (Mar 25, 2009 "Cloud Computing: Understand the Risks"); Information Security Resources (Oct 26, 2009 "Sidekick Goof Shows Cloud Computing Risks"); and EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley (Feb 10, 2009 "Above the clouds: A berkeley view of cloud computing") all of which point out the issues I have presented above. DEAL WITH IT!--BruceGrubb (talk) 22:02, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Easy tiger. If you want it in the article and know how to use the talk page then you have the means & motivation to do it yourself - just don't create another "criticism" coatrack, rather integrate it into the appropriate section and keep it balanced/neutral. Remember that one person's privacy or security problem is another's feature (I'd much rather my data be in the cloud than lugged around on someone's laptop or USB key for example). -- samj _in^out 14:26, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Except as one of the references use in the lead in just what "cloud computing" even is is a little on the vague side. As for 'integrate it rather than have a criticism section' idea I have found that to be Doublespeak for 'let bury this within the flow of the text so people can't easily find out what problems this has'.--BruceGrubb (talk) 22:18, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Irony

"Private cloud and internal cloud are neologisms" What article is this again? oh. Right. --96.241.225.160 (talk) 20:39, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

What about "security/privacy" issues?

Hi, there is concern about how security/privacy will be addressed and audited in a public/hibrid cloud environment. Some research/WPs (Gartner, ISACA, ENISA among others) are beginning to be available. IMHO, a section covering these issues must be included in the article, as some potential adopters are currently hesitating about embracing the paradigm at this point in time.
Regards, DPdH (talk) 13:34, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Good point. It's probably also worth discussing the related compliance issues. Perhaps a separate page? If nobody else steps up by then, I might give it a whirl in a week or so. Obdurodon (talk) 02:26, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

More conflicts of interest?

The recent additions of learn.com by Learn2009 doesn't seem like it's intended to increase the objective information content of the article. If no explanation is forthcoming, they should probably be removed. Obdurodon (talk) 16:47, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Repetitive

At the beginning, in the abstract says: The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams. Later, in the next paragraph, say: The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that is often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams. Is not the same thing? Felipebm (talk) 11:16, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Misdirected definition of Grid Computing

In the section "comparisions" the definition of Grid contains the term "cluster of.. ". How can grid computing associated with cluster.?? The term cluster is associated with tight couplng. But in a Grid coupling is always loose.

vishnuprathish@gmail.com —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.254.142.205 (talk) 07:16, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Criticism Section Removed

I added a criticism section to the cloud computing page a couple months ago. It was removed by User talk:Samj:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cloud_computing&diff=327762799&oldid=327762662

His reason for removal didn't make sense to me so I started a topic on his talk page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SamJohnston#Explain_removal

I am not making any progress. I just keep getting new and unsupported criticisms while my questions about his previous criticisms go unanswered. I want to fix the criticism section and repost it, but this is very difficult in the absence of any good feedback. Should I undo his removal? Should I escalate this to some one? Please advise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.142.40.6 (talk) 17:56, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Quoting the {{criticism-section}} template:

This article's Criticism or Controversy section(s) may mean the article does not present a neutral point of view of the subject. It may be better to integrate the material in those sections into the article as a whole.

Criticism sections tend to end up being coatracks for soundbytes that add little value and are often misrepresentative; valid criticisms should be integrated into the appropriate part(s) of the article. The three [in]famous quotes you've provided are individual opinions and misrepresent the positions of the free software community, Forrester and Oracle, and the primary criticism (a "seemingly broad and vague definition") is weak in comparison to the real issues around security, privacy, liability, etc. - "client/server" applies to virtually everything we do with computers these days but you don't see people bitching about its' definition now, do you? I've copied the section below for you to integrate into the relevant section(s) but I would suggest focusing on the issues rather than individuals' opinions. -- samj _in^out 02:02, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Critics of cloud computing cite its seemingly broad and vague definition. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison observes that cloud computing has been defined as "everything that we currently do" . Forrester VP Frank Gillett expresses similar criticism . Many technologies that have been branded as "cloud computing" have existed for a long time before the "cloud" label came into existence. Examples include databases, load balanced on-demand web hosting services , network storage, real time online services , hosted services in general , etc.

"***tend*** to end up being coatracks," "***may*** mean the article does not present a neutral point of view," "***may*** be better to integrate the material." Please address the issues. How is this particular criticism section a coatrack? How is it not neutral? Why is it better to integrate this material? Don't just profile and discriminate against all criticism sections without addressing the actual information contained within this specific criticism section.

"I would suggest focusing on the issues rather than individuals' opinions." Good advice. In this case the issue is that cloud computing has been defined as everything that we currently do. This fact is supported by the two industry CEOs that I cited. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.142.40.6 (talk) 19:37, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

By "tend to end up being coatracks" I mean "has in the past for this specific article". We rapidly end up with a sprawling mass of everything negative that's ever been said about the subject rather than a coherent discussion of each of the issues in turn. If you want to discuss privacy then create or extend a privacy section and describe the pros and cons; information is outside of your control (-ve) but doesn't get carted around on USB keys etc. (+ve). Regarding the definition, what we have is accurate and need not be precise - client/server was not precise and nobody cared. -- samj _in^out 19:29, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Re: "We rapidly end up with a sprawling mass of everything negative that's ever been said about the subject." And that is justification for removal? That's like me removing the entire cloud computing page because it breeds controversy and disagreement. Proponents may disagree with the critics, but that's no reason to nuke the whole thing. In fact, neutrality demands opposing viewpoints, does it not? Also, it's not hard to label the entire rest of the cloud computing article as a sprawling mass... it's a massive topic with tons of applications, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. 64.142.40.6 (talk) 20:45, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Re: "If you want to discuss privacy then create or extend a privacy section and describe the pros and cons." Good advice. I want to discuss criticism of cloud computing in general. A new criticism section seems the most appropriate since that discussion doesn't fit in any one subtopic. If any new information is posted to the criticism section which is more appropriately placed in an existing section then it's easy to move it. 64.142.40.6 (talk) 20:45, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Re: