Cloud computing is all the hype right now, but what does it really mean?

Do you have to
be sitting on a mountain with a computer among the clouds? Or on a plane with a laptop?
Does it work when its sunny? Can you actually type on a cloud computing keyboard?
Cloud computing is pretty big thats going bigger everyday. There are 3 basically layers
in cloud computing. Companies use them differently based on what they offer.

At the bottom is the foundation - the infrastructure. This is where things start and where
people begin to build. This is the layer where cloud hosting lives. So lets talk about
hosting in the cloud which is an older concept that to the technology advances is finally
starting to work really well. Lets say youre a company and you have a website and the
website has a lot of short conversations that are exchanged between members. You start
with the few users talking to each other and they start telling their friend about their site
and they tell their friends and their friends tell their friends and so on. You are successful.
But one success comes with problems. Your equipment just cant keep up with the
demand. Your service slows down. And suddenly youre in trouble.

Now you have a better option - Cloud Computing. With cloud computing, you have
access to computing power instantly when you need it. Put your website on a cloud server
just you wouldve put it on a dedicated server and when people start visiting your site, if
suddenly need more computer power dedicated to your website you can scale up as much
as you need instantly. You get your computing power as you need it from the cloud - on
demand and your customers stay happy without noticing any difference and if your traffic
tips back down, you can release your servers back into the cloud just as easily. This is a
major advantage. When you need more computing power, you can get it instantly from
the cloud and when youre done with it, you release it back to the cloud.

How do you actually work with the cloud? You cant physically touch your hardware?
Easy. Using your own personal computer. You remotely access your cloud server and
control it. You can put whatever you need on it. Website or Software or Code, whatever
and then just disconnect it when youre done. You never actually touched it physically.
The key with cloud computing is not to focus on the hardware. You just focus on your
website o software or code or whatever it is youre doing. Think of any of the cloud
service. Do you really care where and what physical servers your emails hosted? Isnt it
vastly more important how the service works and its reliable and stable to use?

Here are 3 reasons why cloud computing is becoming so popular.

1. Scalability - its easy to grow or shrink to match your demand. If you need one, two or
ten servers, with cloud hosting you can easily grow or shrink the no. based on what you
need.
2. Instant - The computer power is there when you need it. Just turn it on. What you need
is instantly available on the cloud and when when your need goes down, you simply turn
them off.
3. Save Money - You only pay for what you use and not for having equipments sit around
in case you might need it.
With cloud hosting, you can stop worrying about your hardware. You can work on
building your business instead. Using cloud computing will save you time and money and
its there for you to use instantly.

But all of these also lead us to the disadvantages and ethical issues in cloud computing.
By surrendering your data to someone else, youre giving them not only the access to it
but also accountability for it. The authorities or others dont have to necessarily to get
through you to get your data. They can actually go to one of these companies depending
on the laws of the country that you happen to reside in. Something to bear in mind.
Theres also the privacy that youre giving up by allowing someone to go through all of
your data.

Facebooks a great example where if youre a young female who is in engaged status,
your Facebook page is gonna be covered with wedding rings and wedding planners and
dresses and all those kind of ads that are targeted directly to you. That what pays for
Facebook to have enough access to store everyones homepage to make sure that its
really snappy. G mails are another great example. You can be reading an email where a
friend says hey, do you wanna go to Hawaii and go scuba diving. Youre gonna see ads
for plane tickets. Youre gonna see ads for scuba diving centers and all of that is just
because the Cloud - the data center that is storing all of these information is reading it and
then bombarding you with the ads that are most likely to pick your interest. Whether
comfortable with that or not thats totally up to you.

There are some disadvantages as well and a YouTuber went through these a lot recently
where both of his YouTube channels were compromised by an account hijacker. What
happened with that is he discovered the advantages and disadvantages first hand. The
advantage is he was eventually able to get it back. It is amazing that all of his data deleted
and taken away from him and just by going through google he did manage to get it back.
The disadvantage, it him a month before he can get anyones attention to help him restore
it. Hes a YouTube partner, were not a YouTube partner. We dont know if anyone will
ever get it back to us if the same situation happens. Disadvantage number two, when all
of his videos were restored to the accounts, not only the videos he had on the accounts
were restored but also the ones the were previously deleted from the accounts was
restored at the same time. Test footage, sort of episodes that never got released, all of it
was just up there all of a sudden when they did the full account restore. So another
disadvantage of the cloud, nothing is ever gone. Because these huge data centers exist so
they can archive as much informations possible even information that you dont
necessarily want to be there anymore.

So the solution for me is I store my data on a windows home server and I can access that
from anywhere and its kind of like my own personal cloud. I can even browse my own
pictures on my phone and I do use social networking like Facebook and YouTube because
there are huge advantages because of the ease of use that you get from using cloud
computing, however my personal comfort with the cloud is very medium because I had
good experiences with the cloud as well as terrible experiences with it.
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