Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete

http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/07/31/cloud-computing-makes-servers-obsolete.aspx

by lmacvittie • 17 years ago

11 26 17 years ago

devcentral.f5.com

wolfhumble• 17 years ago

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

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

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.

timwiseman2• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

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

modoc• 17 years ago

There's also a lot of software which (for now) licenses by the core or physical socket and will not run (technically and/or legally) in a cloud or virtualized environment.

tybris• 17 years ago

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.

dan_the_welder• 17 years ago

Nothing has ever made anything obsolete.

jshen6• 17 years ago

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.

TrevorJ3• 17 years ago

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

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

cnlwsu• 17 years ago

I think the title is misleading. at the end of the article I think this sums it up well:

"let’s start right now and focus on the application as the central entity to our architectures, not the physical server"

jshen6• 17 years ago

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.

tdavis3• 17 years ago

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.

TrevorJ3• 17 years ago

I guess my basic point is that people talk about the "cloud" like it is a magical entity that solves all our problems when it comes to server load, resources and data. The reality is, it's still hardware, it's still physical, and it is still a limited resource.

Not having to think about something doesn't change the nature of the thing you aren't thinking about. Clouds are still built from servers.

billswift• 17 years ago

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.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

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

MicahWedemeyer• 17 years ago

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.

brutimus• 17 years ago

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.

vicaya• 17 years ago

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.

Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete

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