Has the Cloud failed before prime-time?
I was thinking about this, is the premise of ‘the cloud’ as an infrastructure failed even before it got well out of the gate?
I am referring to the slew of outages the last day’s and weeks of some high profile infrastructures like Amazon S3 and Google. I always thought Googles infrastructure was untouchable. But it seemed that I had woken up to a different world last week. When I saw tweets and messages going around with ‘Gmail is down’
It raises the valid question. Can you , start-up or otherwise (Enterprise) bank on the Cloud as a valid infrastructure option?
I’d say yes- of-course- it is my business to be evangelistic to the point of being annoying about these kind of things. But something I read made more sense… P2P.
No (well, yes) not downing Indiana Jones and the Chrystal Skull though torrents. I mean P2P Search (Faroo) Calls (Skype) and storage (Wuala)
And when I switch on my PS3. In it’s idle time it will do some Protein Folding on his own. He together with a couple of hundred-thousand other PS3. So P2P App Engine is not far around the corner, it is probably at least in the same city already.
The same things that give Cloud based infrastructure it’s credit, cheap scalability, more then usual high availability, size and ease of implementation is also what keeps start-ups from entering- since all that -cheap and -fast and easy and scalable stuff comes at a cost…Amazons and Google’s (and recently IBM) server park runs in the tens of thousands machines. It is incredibly expensive to run an operation like that, let alone build one from scratch..
You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys
However it is incredible cheap and relatively easy for a group of smart people to come up with a P2P solution to the same problem…
Take for instance Skype. It has about 10 million people at any one time supporting the infrastructure. Those are 10 million machines all doing their (albeit little) part.
Now imagine somehow, someway that something like that could be implemented for hosting or computing, we have things like SETI and FOLDING @ home. But those things are really hard to enter into as a business or entrepreneur.
P2P Cloud computing in general will be the future of infrastructure
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“P2P Cloud computing in general will be the future of infrastructure”
This, in the future, will be in a quote collection together with:
“The Internet is just a fad.”
[...] Kotrotsos in a recent article claims that the cloud has failed, and instead advocates a P2P cloud architecture: I am referring to the slew of outages the last day’s and weeks of some high profile [...]
[...] Read it here. [...]