In the guest lecture
of this week, one guest from Amazon gave us some brief introduction about their
cloud services and some successful start-up examples powered by Amazon EC2
services such as DropBox and Instagram. Besides his detailed explanations and
suggestions about startup work flow emphasizing on business model (actually I
did not quite get all the content because business model really requires some
background knowledge…. :P), I did some deep thinking about the cloud service.
Cloud computing
is really not a fresh topic in recent years, even though most of the people
probably do not understand what it is. While indeed it is influencing our lives
more and more without our awareness. Amazon may not be the first one to push
out this service. But it is qualified to be treated as the pioneer of cloud
service. Under the pressure of Amazon on pushing cloud service intensively, great
IT companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have deployed their own cloud services
respectively. Therefore, now we can automatically get the PDF files, the
videos, the bookmarks and so on from any others devices which support the same
cloud. These benefits really leave a deep impression for people on cloud
service but they are far from the whole meanings of cloud.
As I know, Cloud
computing is a new kind of interactions relations among numbers of clients and
servers. In the past, the client side could just passively receive the content
sent by server without any customizing ability. As time goes on, the positions
of client and server become more and more balanced by the increasing technical improvements
of browsers. While for cloud, I will say it does emphasize more on client side,
which means that client own more power to control and customize the whole work
flow in the internet interactions and services. Furthermore, cloud enables
users to “move” the tough computing work to cloud side, which owns huge
computing power. In this case, user own huge computing resource by just a bit
cost to enable them carry out much more large-scale business without deploying
too many hardware facilities. That is what Instagram and DropBox applied
successfully and how Amazon EC2, S3, etc. and many other cloud services gain
profits. So with the development of cloud service, the structure and strategies
of many companies especially IT companies has changed greatly and start-up
becomes more and more popular as the investment requirements become much lower.
Therefore, no
matter in industry area or society area, cloud has proved itself to be a
significant role in current age. It makes a person to be much more “powerful”. It
is accelerating the development of the World.
Around 4 years ago someone came to interview me (as part of a CNM assignment) about my thoughts on cloud, and at that time I was very skeptical. Having worked with cluster computers for some years, I felt that cloud computing was nothing more than yet another case of taking old technology, and slapping on a new name and making new buzzwords.
ReplyDelete4 years later, with things like Dropbox and Google Drive, it's very obvious that I was wrong and cloud really changed the world. I think what's different is that unlike cluster computers of the past that were used mostly for their computing power, cloud computing now provides instant access to data everywhere, together with the powerful tools (like GoogleDocs) to access and manipulate that data. The proliferation of mobile devices have certainly helped a lot, because cloud computing helps to overcome the limitations of these devices.