Yes, it was some kind of ironical use. But in fact the remote storage and services we call "cloud" is not more revolutionary than the same thing done locally.
With all those new tablets we move around in our houses and outside[1] we certainly need a central repository of things like our music and pictures, and Google and Amazon et al. know it well enough[2], but I do not agree to trust them with my important stuff, and some recent bad experiences show that data sent to the "cloud" is not your anymore, except if you run this "cloud" on your server.
Well, if you get three-five small machines, put CouchBase on them, and maybe even install the CBFS (couchbase filesystem) project, do you not have a private cloud? Replication, failover, etc.
You certainly have a private cluster.
While "cloud" is associated with living in some datacenter somewhere, it is not a precise technical term, and there's a lot of marketing towards businesses to "build an enterprise cloud" (where it's a private cluster in a datacenter or building owned by the business.)
You seem to imply that there's a minimum latency between your personal machine and the "cloud" machines for the cloud term to apply. Or just that the servers have to be owned by someone else?
I think the real meaning (or intended) for "cloud" is a cluster, or set of services that are designed to run on clusters....a collection of machines that provide services, as opposed to the specific meaning of "cluster" which is a set of machines providing a specific service.
>You seem to imply that there's a minimum latency between your personal machine and the "cloud" machines for the cloud term to apply.
not latency, abstraction. If i'm building a server out of parts and wiring it up in my closet, that's a server. If somebody else wires up a server in their closet and rents it out to me, that's a cloud. The cloud means not having to think about things like hard drives failing, and keeping hot spares of servers. So yes, that often means failover clusters but the real point of cloud is that it doesn't matter whether it's a cluster or not - the physical architecture is somebody else's problem.
> If somebody else wires up a server in their closet and rents it out to me, that's a cloud. The cloud means not having to think about things like hard drives failing, and keeping hot spares of servers.
I'd say a VPS could nominally be called part of a cloud, but most serious deployments, pre-cloud, were some sort of colo arrangement where if a hardware part died you had to either drive up to the DC and go swap out for a new one, or else call up the DC staff and ask them nicely to fix it for you. Your hosting wasn't a black box.
I'm confused (and perhaps younger than you). It went like this: servers under desk -> colo -> vps/cloud/everything as a service? There wasn't a huge dedicated hosting market between colo and cloud?
You mean a server? I don't want to be one of those people who bitches about using "cloud" as a buzzword, but there has to be some sort of limit.