Dunkle Wolken
Cloud Computing ist ein noch relativ neues Konzept. Das möglicherweise größte Argument ist die Möglichkeit IT-Ressourcen "elastisch" zu nutzen - viel Kapazität bei hohem Bedarf, wenig Kapazität bei geringem Interesse.
Zitat aus einem gerade veröffentlichten wissenschaftlichen Text mit dem Titel "Above the Clouds":
Developers with innovative ideas for new interactive Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about over-provisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or under-provisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get their results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT. The economies of scale of very large-scale datacenters combined with "pay-as-you-go" resource usage has heralded the rise of Cloud Computing. It is now attractive to deploy an innovative new Internet service on a third party's Internet Datacenter rather than your own infrastructure, and to gracefully scale its resources as it grows or declines in popularity and revenue. Expanding and shrinking daily in response to normal diurnal patterns could lower costs even further. Cloud Computing transfers the risks of over-provisioning or under-provisioning to the Cloud Computing provider, who mitigates that risk by statistical multiplexing over a much larger set of users and who offers relatively low prices due better utilization and from the economy of purchasing at a larger scale.
Ungeklärt: Datenaustausch zwischen Computing Clouds
Vint Cerf, "Chief Internet Evangelist" bei Google und einer der "Väter des Internets" weist jetzt jedoch auf kommende Probleme hin - vor allem beim Austausch von Daten zwischen verschiedenen Clouds. Hier fehle es an Standards und einer Grundarchitektur. Auch Fragen zum Datenschutz seien bisher nicht beantwortet. Bei einigen der aktuellen Herausforderungen fühlt er sich an die Zeiten des Arpanets erinnert. Gemeinsam mit Robert Kahn hat Cerf das TCP/IP-Protokoll entwickelt und damit die Architektur des heutigen Internets geschaffen.
Link:
Vint Cerf: Despite Its Age, The Internet is Still Filled with Problems - ReadWriteWeb