Cloud silliness
First up: Marcus J. Ranum on Cloud Computing Security.
This week at PayPal X Innovate 09, it was sponsored by Zuora, a company which claims to be “Powering the Business Cloud”.
But my favourite thing has to be the term “private cloud”. So, you’ve got cloud computing which is pitched as “hey, why bother running data centers - Google, Amazon, Microsoft and these other big companies know how to do this better than you will, so just pay them for computing as a service!”
Which is okay, I guess. Until someone says “ah, but I don’t really like the idea of a large third-party company having all my data and software running on their computers. What if they do something evil with it? Gain a competitive advantage? Sell off our data to a competitor? What happens if they go bust? Really, I’m a bit suspicious of this whole thing.”
To which the vendors go, “Oh, don’t worry! If you don’t trust us, you can use the services we are selling but on a server running in your datacenter.”
At which point normal people say “The alternative to cloud computing is buying and maintaining servers.”
But the cloud people go “OMG IT’S A PRIVATE CLOUD!!”
Morons.
I’m all retrosexual about this stuff. Programmers write software. It runs on computers. Sometimes those computers belong to you. Other times they don’t. Sometimes they are on the Internet, sometimes they aren’t. We’ve been doing this for some time now: timesharing systems in the 70s and 80s, BBSes, shared hosting providers, rented colocation services and VPS. Gee whiz: you can run software on computers. Who would have guessed?
Here is the future of computing: programmers will write code. Then they’ll compile it. Then it’ll run on computers. It’s really fucking simple. And if you want to wrap up this in seventeen layers of virtualization and bullshit, that’s your prerogative, but you can leave me the fuck alone.
Seriously: Ubuntu are promoting this shit. Really. Finally the motivation to drop Ubuntu and install Debian.
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