Monthly Archives: December 2008

Cloud Computing – The Internet becomes our computer

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Cloud Computing is a new paradigm (concept or model) that uses all the computing power and new technologies that Internet makes available nowadays. Until recently, all this power and technologies were used in a disarticulated way and without focusing their deployment strategies in the users’ needs.

In the beginning, in the Tim Berners Lee’s Web, the rule (the only available option) was to build static sites, without any kind of interaction or users contribution. Nowadays all things are different, “modern” Internet users, more than just plain consumers, want to be producers and critics. Interacting and sharing as wasn’t possible until now. They want to be part of the Web and they want the Web as part of themselves.

This change in users’ behavior, this demand of interaction potentialities and, at the same time, the demand of share capabilities, are forcing the service providers to develop more advance and user centric technologies. Internet users are also changing the way they use the Internet, they are adjusting their behavior to this technology’s change, and they are learning to use Web pages as ordinary desktop applications.

The term “Cloud Computing ” take us to the idea of a large cloud that bring us services in the same way that our personal computer does, but just as a real cloud, which navigates through the sky, this new term also presents a freedom that, nowadays, we just don’t have. Our computer is no longer stuck “between four walls” or inside of a suitcase that we religiously transport. With Cloud Computing we are able to have all our files, our programs, available everywhere. The Internet becomes our computer.

Our programs are available just like as a service, there is no longer the need to install or update we just simply use. Web pages become powerful daily work tools and their access, their maintenance is guaranteed by a service provider.

For companies, Cloud Computing enlarges this concept providing a whole development platform of housing and computing services. Companies Datacenters are no longer between walls to be in the cloud. This paradigm allows a costs reduction, increasing the availability and the quality of the services…

Cloud Computing: why not just call it WEB 2.0

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WEB 2.0 (or Read-Write-Web, or…), being most of all a boom in technology development and a change in the users’ behavior, that’s far from the whole, Cloud Computing brings what was missing: users’ interface homogenization, interoperability, better access control and Identity management, business models, etc. All this things are part of other paradigms, concepts and technologies, but Cloud Computing tries to group everything in a concise and clear way.

Cloud it or not to Cloud it?

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Cloud it or not to cloud it, will be for certain one of the major questions that the IT departments will have to face in the 2009/2010 period. They are always confronted with the need to reduce their platform costs and to increase the performance. In the upcoming times they will have to confront these necessities or challenges more than ever. With all the experts (if we forget the existing skeptics) saying that with Cloud Computing we will increase availability, performance, security, and despite that, we will be able to reduce the costs, I’m sure that all the IT departments should have to start questioning themselves – Cloud it or not to cloud it?

It’s obvious that its not clear that Cloud computing is the IT department’s salvation, but, I think that this paradigm will help the IT experts move forward and get better results from their efforts.

For more numbers and opinions you can read some thoughts  about it:

(this is an old text and it’s already result of our 2008 review)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8199

-By 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud
computing service and 30 percent of them will pay for cloud computing
infrastructure.

-Through 2010, more than 80 percent of enterprise use of cloud computing
will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively
parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT
infrastructure.

cloudviews.org now supports OpenID logins

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Identity Management and all the technologies that are related to it are one of cloudviews’ core subjects. Supporting a highly adopted open Identity Platform as OpenID is mandatory for us. We will continue to test other technologies, like  Information Cards (higgins) but with OpenID, for exemple, I’m already able to login with my I-Name: =paulo.calcada.  Unfortunately,  the OpenID module for wordpress is only able to recognize my I-Name in its URI version: xri.net/=paulo.calcada. But at least until XRI 2.0 is not approved or redesigned, the XRI_2_URI is acceptable  :).

With this feature all our authors will also  have their accounts turned into a OpenID account. They will be able to login in other OpenID enabled sites with www.cloudviews.org/author/foo_bar.

We will discuss OpenID with more detail soon. You can start exploring it by yourself at the OpenID site,  or if you want more advanced stuff you can take a look into this Nat Sakimura’s excellent post: “Problems of HTTPS (&HTTP) based OpenID“.