On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 10:39:07 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 15:07 -0400, Nick Sabalausky via
(Kinda like how "cloud" sounds like a big fancy new revolution
until you realize it's just the hip new word for "internet" or
"hosted".
Yes - technically it is nothing new perhaps. But it's a
commercial phenomenon, and so whilst the marketing hype is
regrettable, if inevitable, it's the commercial aspects that are
important here, much more than technical ones.
Big technological shifts (speaking about things viewed from a
societal level, not from a practitioner's perspective) have two
components - big relative price shift (which might be infinite in
practical terms to a large fortune or from cheap to very cheap
depending on the situation), and then the new activities and new
ways of doing old things that become possible as a consequence of
this price shift. Business people take a long time to figure it
out (see Brynjolfsson's work on organisational architecture), and
that's why we have a period of hand-wringing between the new
technology arriving and us seeing its broader benefits. Solow,
an expert on growth, observed in 1987 that "computers are
everywhere but in the productivity statistics". (My theory then
was that people were too busy fiddling with fonts on their Macs
to actually do any work!). A decade later, we had a different
view of their influence. Similarly we have people saying today
"how many jobs has Twitter created?". But it's not the people
that Twitter directly employ, but those that benefit both from
using it, and from the broader set of shifts of which Twitter is
only the beginning. Blyth Masters, for example, is doing some
interesting work on exploring possibilities from using blockchain
type technologies for wholesale finance. There are some obvious
problems there, but I wouldn't care to bet nothing interesting
comes out of it. But it's much bigger than that, even though I
can only be aware of a part of it.
In any case, we have now inconceivable amounts of computing power
on tap for very affordable prices and the tools to manage it.
When a little instance is 0.7 cents an hour, and a usable one is
1.5 cents and you can scale up and down as quickly as you like,
many things become possible that weren't before. The world is
only slowly beginning to figure out what, judging by what I see
in finance.
"Cloud" is really a destruction of personal computing in favour
of re- centralization of all computing: put the computing power
back in the hands of the people who want to control what you
may or may not do with computers. Beyond this is gets political.
Does that sound about accurate, or am I missing something?
Since I am foolish enough to run my own mail server, you can be
sure that my sympathies are with you. I think people are
reckless - both individuals and corporations - in what they
unthinkingly cede to companies that really have few incentives to
act as one might wish. It's one thing to be the customer, and
quite another to be the product. I saw Eric Schmidt speak some
years back, and he really didn't give me a feeling that we have a
similar idea about what evil means!
This being said, the world has always been broken in some
respect, and we shouldn't let that stop us looking at the
situation objectively even if one would wish in some respects
things were other than they are. The cloud may be centralising
things for the individual, but at the corporate level it's less
clear. In particular, it's a classic case of the accounting
being pretty clear that the economies of scale mean you should
centralise IT infrastructure and it's management, but the
practical experience of the people actually generating value
within the enterprise often being rather different. Things even
in quite small firms of 150+ people start being more about
internal bureaucratic logic and much less about ROI. And the
problem is that it's hard to make a convincing case for something
that doesn't yet exist, and yet many big things have the tiniest
beginnings. So the current enterprise technology environment
discourages those little experiments that drive real innovation,
as well as getting in the way of larger projects. The cloud, by
commoditising compute, and making the price much more transparent
then is a force for breaking down central structures that no
longer serve their needs well. When you can get whatever you
need from Amazon today, waiting months and paying 10x more starts
to seem a little stiff, and people start asking questions when
before they had no choice but to grin and bear it. Of course the
questions about privacy and commercial confidentiality are there,
but perhaps solutions are arriving, and business people need to
be practical. Even an overpriced internal cloud gives much more
power to internal entrepreneurs than did the old way.
I think you are missing some aspects of why there is sanity to
what is happening, but you are not wrong that there is a lot of
"buzz" and "hype", but that tends to go along with anything
"trendy" and "hip". And there is a lot of reinventing the wheel
because the hipsters create cool new stuff, but have failed to
study the last 60 years of computing before doing so.
It may not be new, but it's new that it's so cheap and so easy.
(And when any idiot can, any idiot will... Which is mostly for
the best, but not always)
Laeeth
