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Re: Cloud Computing with Octave


From: Georgios Kousiouris
Subject: Re: Cloud Computing with Octave
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:19:06 -0000

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> said:

> 
> >
> > The technology itself is not violating your freedom. Its usage by specific
> > parties/people does. Technology as a concept is neutral. It may be used for
> > good or malicious purposes.
> 
> "Technology" is a misdirection here. There isn't any significant
> technological advance at stake. 
>"Cloud computing" usually just means
> "computer network". 

No, that's not valid at all. "Computer network" means "Computer network".
"Cloud computing" means combination of virtualization issues, resource sharing
and scheduling issues, concurrency and multi-tenancy issues, performance
interference at cpu,network and storage, and that's just at the infrastructure
layer. At the software and platform layers there are many more even more
challenging aspects like elasticity, application scaling, data integrity  etc. 

So as a technology advancement, they are most fascinating, if one bothers to
actually read about them.

>Yes, there's nothing wrong with using computer
> networks. The actual potential problem is when you're running code on
> a machine you cannot control, are not free to control, and thus have
> little reason to trust.

Have you ever been given an account on a server or system in general without
root privileges? I guess you have, I have plenty of times, either as a student
or afterwards. Did you have ability to control that system? Did you use that
system even though it was out of your control? Should you have the ability to
control it? What if you didn't have the necessary knownledge and did something
that messed up the entire configuration?

What is more, there is also the case of a private cloud run by a single entity
(e.g. company or university) that may give the capability to its members
(employees or students) to use these software and hardware resources as a
service, without having to know (in most cases they don't want to know either)
anything about what is going on in the backstage. Isn't this helpful? Is there
a trust issue involved? Isn't the code you write as an employee of a company
already on an SVN or something similar? Isn't the load balancing and dynamic
usage (based on temporal need)of resources beneficial for the operation of the
institution/company?

Furthermore, should all of the users be computer experts in order to have
access and usage of scalable resources or exotically installed applications?
Are all the users able to have their own private clusters (both from a capital
expenditure and knowledge-to-setup point of view)? Isn't this ability to start
up a company with zero capital on IT investment a type of freedom? So even if
you see it from a business model point of view, cloud computing gives the
democratic ability to the individual to actually matter and create something
from scratch without having the extended knowledge or capital that would
otherwise be needed to compete with existing, long standing companies.

Again, I am not arguing on using Cloud computing for everything. There are
cases where it offers significant benefits and other cases where it has
drawbacks (security-wise or otherwise). It is all up to the use case, but
discarding the technology as a whole is not the answer. 

BR,
George
 


> 
> - Jordi G. H.
> 
> 



-- 





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