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In more interesting news: this weekend, Flickr suddenly highlighted the problems of relying on cloud storage for your files. A photoblogger who'd used the service for five years, sticking about four thousand photos on there, informed Flickr about someone plagiarising his work and passing it off as their own. In response, Flickr accidentally killed
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But there are key differences. Commodity hardware, better communications (and payment!) infrastructure, and ubiquitous local processing resources.
I think it's here to stay, because I've been wading in it for nearly 10 years now. Cloud's big news, but back in 03 I was building a VMWare ESX farm, which let us do on the fly migration. It was a really big deal, because it gave us - as the IT department - a really incredible ability to do new things. New projects could start instantly, rather than having to size and spec and buy hardware.
Test and development similarly we could turn around much faster.
Low end services, we could virtualize and consolidate.
And then we could migrate everything around, and do zero-downtime maintenance.
Very cool stuff. Cloud services I think are just the next phase - moving from early adopter into the consumer market. I'm actually very excited about the possibilities of smart phones - which are limited in capacity, battery life, performance and display area - when you attach to a cloud resource - I use gmail and dropbox quite a lot, because I can go from smartphone -> netbook -> laptop -> desktop without having to much care. I have VNC installed on my phone, and so can remote control back and forth.
And I'm starting to see tablets creeping into the company - we're already talking about tablet computers instead of hardcopy meeting slides.
But it's still the mainframe all over again. It's just now we can use the global mainframe, on a terminal that's in our pocket.
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