What is cloud computing?

you might be thinking we're supposed to be talking about the future why are we talking about cloud computing cloud computing is something I hear about all the time but cloud computing is a movement and sort of a redesign of some fundamental interactions on the Internet that may have big consequences for our interactions on the Internet in the future what is cloud computing so cloud computing is is really sort of a rebranding of an old idea of distributed computing so you know the idea is that I connect to this all-powerful cloud and the cloud is what we're I sort of for what provides me with my email the provide cloud might also deliver music to my device the cloud can host webpages and the idea is that inside what is the cloud well the clouds just a bunch of machines right a bunch of machines and various data centers around the world maybe there's one data center there another data center here and so there's no mystery there's no magic to the cloud the cloud is distributed computing the cloud is just a bunch of machines in a room somewhere so if you want to see the cloud Google the pictures of Google's data centers and you can see you know thousands of thousands of machines and that's part of the cloud in Google cloud computing so again there's no magic or mystery here but the term cloud computing is some of the goals of kabab computing are really supposed to mean that the cloud is this all-powerful reliable entity so the cloud is never doubt the cloud will always have time to process my data the cloud will always have somewhere to store my data and so you know you try to sort of tear away some of the individual machines you might see in distributed computing and I can back an entire interface I can back an entire service with this amorphous set of computing resources that will always be available and will always be ready to serve my needs so that's sort of the goal of cloud computing now what's interesting about cloud computing from my perspective is that it you know the in the early days of computing computers were these big expensive devices they were locked inside a room somewhere and there were very few people that had access to so one of the reasons that Bill Gates got started was that he access to a computer and back when he was growing up that was actually really weird you didn't have a computer at home Bill Gates got special permission to go use this computer in you know close to where he lived and he was actually able to program that computer frequently and so he got a lot of practice he was very good at programming in an age where that was very difficult to do because most people didn't have a computer to use then there was this whole movement so you know you see start in the 60s 70s computers of these expensive things that very few people and they have access to and the vision of how we were going to provide people access to computers was this idea that was known as dumb terminals so I would I would not have a computer at home what I would have is essentially just a display all I would have is a monitor and that monitor would be connected to some powerful computer in a closet somewhere that was very carefully maintained by a team of experts and that's how I would get access to computers now at some point what happened is the transistors kept getting more powerful more powerful and smaller and eventually personal computer this whole movement which we take for granted but it really was a huge change in how people thought about computing you can actually buy your own computer computer clubs got started and there's a huge movement towards people having really powerful computers at home so your you know parents me a lot of people owned a PC a desktop computer that computer is thousands if not millions of times more powerful than those old servers that we were going to use to run these dumb terminals so computers got really powerful and they got cheap so a bunch of people bought one that's so that was sort of you know the the contribution of the personal computing movement now it's sort of interesting because now we're sort of headed back in time in a way with this idea of cloud computing back towards this notion of dumb terminals so now we're seeing more and more aggregation of computing power in the cloud and we're seeing that the end-user devices whether it be a smartphone in a laptop are to some degree becoming you know less and less powerful so think about something like a netbook you can buy a Google Chromebook and you can use that and it's a pretty reasonable computer but what makes it so powerful the fact that it's essentially a dumb terminal that's getting access to cloud resources so this is an interesting vision for the future of computing right now we're living in an error a lot of us still have a fairly powerful computer with it's a laptop or a desktop at home even our smartphones are pretty powerful maybe 10 20 30 years in the future if cloud computing continues to sort of dominate the computing landscape all we might own at home is essentially a monitor a dumb terminal where all of it just allows us to interact with the cloud but all of the computation all the storage all the smarts all of the computing is actually located in the cloud in some data center somewhere else same thing with my smartphone my smartphone become they become less and less of an actual computer and more and more just some interaction device that I used to use these cloud services so this is one vision of the future of computing there are other people pushing back on this in different directions because there's some problems with cloud computing but it's interesting to me that you know to some degree this new terminology is really pulling us back in time and maybe at some point people look back at the personal computer movement is this weird artifact to computing history where for the strange period of time everybody wanted to own a computer and why would anyone want that anymore because now all I have is this terminal I pay $10 a month for it it's in my room and it's faster than your computer today because it's essentially just tied in to this all-powerful clock you

Channel: internet-class

Views: 2,504

Keywords: internet, internet-class.org

Id: B4mYaPaEAoU

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2016