In response to Cory Doctorow’s article Not Every Cloud has a Silver Lining, and a recent discussion on Slashdot. We here at Casa Nova Designs would like to comment about cloud computing and what it means for our customers, and for our customer’s users.

What is cloud computing?
Before we begin this discussion it is important to define, for this conversation, what cloud computing is. Cloud computing is an ambiguous term that can refer to everything from hosting to interface, from our standpoint we take cloud computing to mean this. Cloud computing is a software design paradigm that removes the majority of storage/computation from an individual user’s computer and instead uses a remote location to process information and store data. While some would argue that cloud computing must have a layer of hardware abstraction (such as Amazon’s S3 platform that totally abstracts the hardware that applications are running on), we believe that any software that runs primarily on a remote machine maintained by either the product vendor or a contractor of the product vendor is cloud computing (irregardless of the architecture of the remote machine). Popular examples of this design paradigm are Google Documents, Gmail, Blackboard, etc.

The bad news first
Because Doctrow’s article is primarily concerned with the risks associated with cloud computing let’s start there. Cloud computing gives all of the power of information to the software vendor. User’s do not maintain a private copy of their data and thus, if a software product which utilizes cloud computing becomes inaccessible all of the user’s data is lost. This does not necessarily mean that this is likely. Google has one of if not the best up time records on the Internet, I would argue that an individual is much more likely to lose data either to malware, hardware failure, or accidental deletion. The flaw with this argument is that, if a software vendor chooses they may forbid users to export their data. I’ll use Google documents as an example for this argument. Google docs, like many cloud applications allows users to download files from their servers to their personal machines, and in google doc’s case this information is provided in several open source formats. To contrast that Microsoft Word, which was the dominant play in this market, allowed users to store all of their documents on their personal machine, but did not allow them to access these documents in a none Microsoft product. So while users were able to store the information on their machine they weren’t free to use it as they pleased, and the potential of losing their data was much more likely than if they stored it on servers maintained by professionals.

The good outweighs the bad
In spite of these issues I believe that cloud computing is helpful to the user community and the software development community. For the user, cloud computing is often client agnostic. I, as a Linux user can access Google docs in Firefox, and if I’m at a friend’s house I can access the same information from a Windows machine. This cross platform compatibility was achieved without any extra thought from google. This is incredibly beneficial to the Linux community, as software platforms move away from Window’s dependence Linux adoption becomes a much smaller hurdle. Also cloud computing is, in many ways, architecture agnostic. I as a developer can create a cloud application in Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python C, C++ on either Linux, Mac, Windows or any other OS I choose. The only requirement is that my server can manipulate data and server is up to the web via http. This is immensely helpful for developers, as they aren’t locked into using any one language or operating system regardless of what their end client is using.

On Cloud 9
In my opinion, cloud computing’s benefits far outweigh it’s risks. Like any paradigm, software developed for the cloud is only as negative as a developer makes it. If Google wanted to control user’s data they could, much like Microsoft controlled users data with their proprietary obfuscated file types. In the hands of benevolent hosts cloud computing offers an exciting new age of computation for the average user. It abstracts their operation system, takes care of backups and requires no updates. True software vendors could create software as a service models that would continually charge users for use, but are these monthly fees going to be worse than the one time expense of purchasing traditional software? These are important issues to consider, but I believe that those decisions lie in the realm of business men. I as a developer embrace cloud computing as a paradigm.

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer
Casa Nova Designs

Delicious Digg This Post Stumble This Post