

Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/07/31/cloud-computing-makes-servers-obsolete.aspx

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TrevorJ
Because the "cloud" is made up of something other than servers?

Am I missing something here, or is this just semantics?

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jshen
Yes you are. You don't have to think about the servers, the cloud abstracts it
away. Here's an analogy. High level languages make memory management obsolete.
You could then ask, "because programs are made up of something other than
memory and instructions?", and you'd definitely be missing something.

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tdavis
Your analogy makes sense, but it is as broken as the central idea in this
piece, and they're both so for the same reason:

Despite high-level languages, memory management is still very much a reality
for many programmers. People still write ASM and C _every day_.

Memory management and physical boxes may be obsolete for Joe Schmoe, but he's
not the guy who makes it possible to ignore these things in the first place.
There are all sorts of folks out there who's choice to gain copious amounts of
low-level knowledge has allowed me to be lazy.

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jshen
I disagree with your implications that someone is lazy if they have concerns
other than low level bit twiddling. Some of us are trying to build businesses
or simply progress the state of the art in other areas. For example, I work in
a research group on information retrieval. I could spend hours of my day
making progress on IR with higher level languages or I could instead waste
productivity on manual memory management. Choosing the former is not being
lazy.

Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management isn't
obsolete for most people is clearly flawed.

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tdavis
I meant the good kind of lazy, so yeah, I wasn't really trying to insult you.

 _Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management
isn't obsolete for most people is clearly flawed._

As flawed as the absolute claim, "Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete". Not
only is it objectively false (servers are necessary for cloud computing, duh),
but it makes no attempt to quantify by saying for whom they've become
obsolete.

I admit to not reading the article (based on the ridiculous title), but if it
claims that cloud computing makes skills in setting up dedicated hardware from
OS up and then engaging in smart capacity planning and proper deployment
schemes so as to make horizontal (or vertical) scaling as painless as possible
without the advantages provided by virtualization less necessary in today's
computing landscape, then...

I agree wholeheartedly!

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jshen
"loud computing makes skills in setting up dedicated hardware from OS up and
then engaging in smart capacity planning and proper deployment schemes so as
to make horizontal (or vertical) scaling as painless as possible without the
advantages provided by virtualization less necessary in today's computing
landscape"

That makes for a great title doesn't it? LOL

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tdavis
Better than <insert sensationalist blanket statement to insight linkbait>.

How about, _Cloud Computing Making Dedicated Hardware Obsolete For Some_. Was
that so difficult? Took me 10 seconds.

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jshen
that isn't a good title. Given the intended audience, you can assume the
readership is smart enough to understand that nuances are not reflected in the
title.

Here are some examples of using your style in well known titles.

God is not Great Most of the time (worse title, but more accurate)

A failure of Capitalism to self regulate banking and insurance and avoid
systemic risk (much worse than the original, but more accurate)

A pale blue dot when viewed from a distant perspective in space (much worse
than the original, but more accurate)

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MicahWedemeyer
All of the fawning over the cloud really irritates me. I use S3 and EC2 and
love them both. However, I also still use local storage and non-EC2 servers.

Everything has its place, and the cloud has definitely not replaced the server
for me, nor do I see that happening any time in the near future. Especially if
you're just starting out, dealing with getting set up in a cloud environment
is a headache you just don't need.

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tybris
Sounds nice in theory, in reality less than 1% of applications really need to
scale and only one "resource" a.k.a. "server" is going to have to do all the
work, simply for economic reasons. Current (shared) PaaS offerings still have
too many limitations and lock-in to be a suitable replacement.

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jacquesm
I think it should read 'cloud computing makes _some_ servers obsolete'.

Not everybody will be able to host 'in the cloud', the kind of data they host
could easily be forbidden to pass to third parties, even for hosting. Think of
medical data, banking and so on.

Quite a few servers could probably be hosted 'in the cloud', but for now the
cost benefits are not really there unless your application falls in to a very
specific niche.

Bandwidth and storage premiums in the cloud make it very tough to position a
cloud based solution vs hosting your own stuff. The only case when it makes
sense is if you need large numbers of servers for a short period and if you
are growing faster than you can order hardware.

It's also great as a fall-back plan and to create redundancy.

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timwiseman
You have a good point, but he at least partially addressed this in the article
when he said "First, I really like the use of the article “a” in reference to
cloud as it speaks to all models of cloud: private, public, external,
internal, and hybrid."

A company that cannot or will not put their data on the internet and "The
Cloud" could at least in principle build "A Cloud" within their own intranet
and host there, still gaining the flexibility of focusing on applications
rather than servers.

Still, I think you have a good point with _cloud computing makes some servers
obsolete_. Some data not only cannot leave the company intranet, but must be
segregated strictly from other data within in the same company. This will
require focusing on the server.

Also, it can (in some cases) be harder and slower to write in such a flexible
than to let it be tied to a single server. Doing that makes no sense if
programmer time is a precious asset in that organization and you will have a
need for massive scaling in the foreseeable future.

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jacquesm
I think you meant to say 'will have no need for massive scaling' ?

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timwiseman
Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry for the rather major typ-o.

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asciilifeform
There is no "cloud." There are only other people's hard drives.

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dan_the_welder
Nothing has ever made anything obsolete.

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jshen
This is true, but I don't choose to use cobol for new projects. In the same
way I don't choose to buy dedicated servers any longer.

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vicaya
Cloud computing provides service abstraction at different levels.

You don't need to think about servers at SaaS (Software as a Service. e.g,
Google Docs/Apps) and PaaS (Platform as a Service. e.g. Google Apple Engine,
Windows Azure; Amazon S3, Elastic MapReduce etc.) level, but you do have
(virtualized) servers when you need IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service. e.g.
Amazon EC2, VMware infrastructure) where you need to put existing/legacy
applications that have clear dependencies on explicit servers in the cloud.

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brutimus
I'm all for distributed services, but only when practical. All services go
down, heck, even Google services have gone down several times recently.

So when your boss is screaming at you "why are we down?!", can you get by with
just saying "because X (the _cloud_ ) is down". Highly unlikely.

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billswift
Twenty years ago I was reading about how networked workstations made
mainframes obsolete, this is just more of the same. Network latency effects,
if nothing else, is going to ensure the continued need for at least some
centralized computing resources.

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wolfhumble
Does anyone any information on how to handle security in the cloud? Seems to
be easier to find hacker patterns monitoring a (virtual) server.

