Dear Readers,
Recently I came across this article, which was a contest on new cloud ideas. When I sent it to Professor Chitta Baral, he asked me to create a small writeup explaining cloud to expected audience, which in this case was students of engineering colleges .
This has been hard, and I'm not an academic, but, let me give this a shot. If one looks at wikipedia , cloud computing means, is the delivery of computing as a service,not as a product,whereby shared resources are provided to computers and devices[mobiles] over a network, typically the Internet.
There is a lot more on that link, but, this is sufficient to explain my view of these purposes. Why does the cloud exist? Answer, a single local computer is not sufficient to provide everything to you. Wasn't that why the Internet came up? So, why cloud computing?
Here's my answer, Today, it is becoming more relevant to keep everything on the network. The days where you stored private data on the PC is fast becoming over.
You store photos on products like facebook, flickr,Picassa. You store videos on Youtube. You store documents using Google docs. And yes[I'm proud of this] ,you store power point slides in slideshare.
Now, some of the above are not labelled as cloud products. But, I insist the technology is similar. Here's the basic algorithm
a) You store data in a centralised storage/server.
b) Create a Viewer to access the data.[correlate this with opening a file on your local laptop]
c) Provide a mechanism which can replicate the data in different systems, so, data is not lost, if one server crashes. This is called building redundancy.
d) Build a mechanism which takes care of consistency. Imagine two people working on the same file. Ensure the data is managed consistently. In certain domains this is called replication management, in others it is called Cluster management. More info, read OS chapter -3 synchronising data across threads. similar principles.
e) Build a brilliant UI where your Girl friend says, "Oooh, This is so cute"
Somewhere, I moved from the algorithm and went to creating a product. But, hey, that's what you gotta do?
So, how does one get ideas. Take anything you love about functions in a computer. Think about what, you can implement. Use the Algo above and create a cloud based system.
List of official Cloud computing products -:
More info required, mail me -: umashankardas@gmail.com.
Request, if anyone else wants to add anything, please do so by e-mail or comment, will include it in the above writeup.
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