There's a lot of buzz about "Cloud Computing" lately. On the user application side we have online word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, photo editors, etc. On the back-end we have file storage, databases, web engines, and the like. It's not that the concept of "Cloud Computing" is new--we've been evolving toward this for sometime--but the label is relatively new and it helps us put our finger on what we've done and gives us a little more vision of what we can do in the future....
When I first heard the term "Cloud Computing" I was a little turned off. It sounded like marketing-speak for something we've been doing for a long time. And I hate when marketers do that! (And yes AJAX, I'm talking to you! A lot of us were doing AJAX before the term was coined and it is still the hack it's always been!) I mean after all, we've been doing web email for over a decade now, right? I can go anywhere in the world, find a computer, log on to the internet, and check my email. Pretty cool. But while I'm in that other part of the world, I can't really pull up that budget spreadsheet that's saved on my computer, unless I have my computer. Or that powerpoint presentation I have on my work computer, unless I'm at my work computer. Sure, I could email those files to myself and then there they'd been in my web email, but what if the computer I was working on didn't have powerpoint installed? Crap, I can't do anything! So enter Google Docs: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation app (read: powerpoint) that I can get to anywhere in the world, on any kind of computer with a browser (PC, Mac, Linux, etc.) as long as I have a connection to the internet. The word processor allows you to download your files to formats like Word and pdf, so that you can print the on a printer and not get the annoying web page headers and footers. The charts and gadgets on the spreesheet amazing. And the little instant message/chat roon that pops up when you run your presentation which allows others to view your presentation online and collaborate in real time, is beyond cool. And think of this, if what they've done so far is amazing, think about all the features they'll be able to add in the future without forcing you, the user, to upgrade your software. You'll wake up one more, and they'll already be there. So that's got me pretty excited.
Beyond Google there are a few other projects that are using RIA (Rich Internet Application) technology like Flash (and soon Silverlight I'm sure), that offer even more of that "Application" look and feel. a.viary.com has some cool things in the works, like photo editors, 3-D drawing tools, and sound editors among others. These can run as AIR applications, so that even though you are going to the internet for your application, you don't need the internet browser, so if feels more like an app. Not to be outdone at their own game Adobe now has an online version of Photoshop, and though it's more like a Photoshop "Lite", it's rumoured that Adobe will eventually put out a close to full featured version of Photoshop for a paid subscription.
So part of the excitement right now is the "death of packaged software". If I were starting a business from the ground up, I'd be so freakin' excited right now. For most of my employees, all they would need, would be a computer with a browser and a connection to the internet. I wouldn't be paying for Microsoft Office licenses for every computer. If I ran Linux on those computers, I wouldn't even be paying for Microsoft Windows. I wouldn't be paying for a mail server. I could set up gmail accounts for everyone and use my company domain name as an alias within gmail. That way, to the rest of the world it would look like I was sending and receiving messages from kenny@mycompany.com. No one would be the wiser. Do you see how much money I'd save in software costs? And labor costs of people maintaining my web servers. And the costs of maintaining my other servers, which brings my to my next point...
What I'm really exciting about is the back-end services that are opening up. I can use the storage capacity of Amazon's servers and the number cruching power of Google's spider web of clustered servers, but I'll speak more to that in my next post...