Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

After several recent experiences, I know a little about cloud computing.

I have been experimenting in several ways recently with cloud computing. The basic sales pitch from a cloud computing provider is:

We’ll buy and maintain the computers.

You rent them from us.

This takes us forward to the past to a day when people couldn’t afford to buy their own computer. Let’s go way back to time-sharing of computers (anyone remember that?). Even in the late 1970s, I would go to an I/O room (not Google I/O but simply the “input-output” room) and send my software to a computer that was somewhere else. I would have a couple seconds of that computer’s time after my “job” waited in line for a day or so. I was somewhat happy in that I didn’t have to try to buy my own computer. I shared a computer with a few thousand of my closest friends.

So here we are now. People still find computing problems for which they can not afford to buy a computer that is powerful enough. The answer: rent a computer from a cloud computing provider.

The difference today is that several companies, e.g., Amazon and Google, but they are not the only ones, have figured out how to be more efficient than anyone else was in the past. They have software that configures virtual computers, runs jobs, tracks time, sends bills to users, etc. with little or no (expensive) human intervention.

It appears to me that the vast majority of human employees in the cloud industry are in sales, but that is another blog post for another day.

And still, the cloud computer user needs a computer, albeit a relatively inexpensive computer—$200 may suffice. But, and this is the big but, the cloud computer user needs a relatively expensive link to the Internet. Yes, you can sit in your car in the parking lot near the Starbucks, but that wears thin quickly as a lot of those formerly nice free Internet access providers have smart software that kicks you off after an hour with little or no (expensive) human intervention.

Once we move past all these factors…yes, it is cheaper to rent a thousand servers for an hour or a week than it is to buy them. Jump in, try something, fail, jump out. If you have what may be the next great idea, this is a great time to be alive.