Comments on: The future of the 'cloud,' open source, and the OS

Three Illuminata research notes take a look at some of the intersections among cloud computing, the way operating systems are designed, and open source.

[palavering]

in awhile is poor word usage. The correct usage is in a while.

[palavering]

in awhile is poor word usage. The correct usage is in a while. Taxonomy and classification are redundant.

[ghaff]

Your're correct about "awhile" (fixed). However, taxonomies--at least in the scientific sense--tend to imply a hierarchy of relationships while classifications I think of more like simple buckets. So using both is a stylistic choice--if hardly necessary.

[mvnuestro]

Cloud Computing and virtualization are just new and fancy terms to describe an old adage "the network is the computer".

[jdzions]

That wasn't an adage; that was a marketing slogan, and mostly hot air. Cloud computing is an architecture which recognizes that computing systems need to be built like networks are built; geographically distributed, loss-tolerant, scalable, composable. There were computer networks before the IP protocol was invented; they didn't have many of those characteristics, and were thus overtaken by the modern Internet.

The network isn't the computer, and the computer isn't the network. But the computing system and the networking system are built an awful lot alike, and are coupled in interesting ways.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure it's quite fair to call "The Network is the Computer" mostly hot air. Sun was relatively early to recognize the value of networks and (relatively) decentralized computing--at least in a large-scale commercial context. But certainly what we're seeing today is a far more intimate merging with and dependence on the network and the servers behind it by client devices than we've generally seen in the past.

(I also wouldn't really call Cloud Computing an "architecture." Maybe something higher like an approach or a concept. But that's a sematic quibble.)