Category Archives: ‘Cloud’ computing
It’s television, Eric, but not as we know it
This morning’s Observer column.
And now for something completely different: Google TV. Yes, you read that correctly: Google TV. Now I know what you’re thinking. You already have enough TV channels, most of them running Friends, Desperate Housewives or reruns of Top Gear. Why on earth would you want to watch a channel in which a T-shirted nerd with an IQ in the low thousands explains how to code an algorithm for complex linear programming in seven lines of Perl while behind him one of his more subversive colleagues is gleefully demonstrating on a whiteboard how it can be done in four?
Relax. Google TV is not a channel, it’s a platform, ie a base on which things can be built. In ordinary life, platforms are physical objects, such as the drilling rig that is causing BP such grief, but the Google guys don’t do physical. They’re geeks, so their idea of a platform is a large piece of software called an operating system. A while back, they created such a platform for mobile phones…
Collaborative editing moves up a gear
Just as Microsoft announces that it is to offer free, ad-supported Web versions of Office applications, Google unveils some really significant enhancements to Google Docs. Could the two things be connected? Perish the thought. And isn’t it interesting that some of the Docs enhanvements remind one of, er, Wave?
Cloud computing: the carbon footprint
In an astute move, Greenpeace is capitalising on iPad frenzy by launching a new report into the carbon footprint of cloud computing.
Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change shows how the launch of quintessential cloud computing devices like the Apple iPad, which offer users access to the ‘cloud’ of online services like social networks and video streaming, can contribute to a much larger carbon footprint of the Information Technology (IT) sector than previously estimated.
To be clear: We are not picking on Apple. We are not dissing the iPad. But maybe someone can come up with an app that calculates the carbon footprint of using different web sites based on their location and energy deals. Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.
The report builds on previous industry research and shows that at current growth rates data centers and telecommunication networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020. That is more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. However, the report also shows how IT can avert climate chaos by becoming a transformative force advocating for solutions that increase the use of renewable energy.
The Register has a helpful summary of the report which also highlights an interesting difference between Apple and Google as cloud proprietors:
Apple’s $1bn data center in Catawba County, North Carolina, currently under construction, will get its energy from a local electrical grid that contains only 3.8 per cent renewable energy, and a full 50.5 per cent from dirty ol’ coal and 38.7 per cent from nasty nukes. Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, by contrast, gets 50.9 per cent of its juice from renewable sources, according to Greenpeace.
Greenpeace is also pretty critical of Facebook’s carbon footprint.
Steady on, boy, steady on
The CEO of salesforce.com has been drinking the Kool-Aid:
The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.
Last week I gave presentations to more than 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland. My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster.
Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2
Type/Click———————————->Touch
Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook
Tabs——————————————>Feeds
Chat——————————————>Video
Pull——————————————->Push
Create—————————————->Consume
Location Unknown————————->Location Known
Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet
Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries. Take health. We have all been waiting for the health application that will revolutionize how we share and communicate with our doctors, and help us make better health care decisions. The apps we have seen as first generation EHR/PHR just have not cut it, and now with ObamaCare there is no killer app to accelerate through the new EHR reimbursement program. The shift ignited by the iPad will allow the proliferation of these new missing apps, and automate the industries and professionals left behind by the last generation of technology. Now, no industry will be left behind.
How secure is the cloud?
Not as secure as the vendors might like to think — at least according to this useful and informative piece by David Talbot.
Computer security researchers had previously shown that when two programs are running simultaneously on the same operating system, an attacker can steal data by using an eavesdropping program to analyze the way those programs share memory space. They posited that the same kinds of attacks might also work in clouds when different virtual machines run on the same server.
In the immensity of a cloud setting, the possibility that a hacker could even find the intended prey on a specific server seemed remote. This year, however, three computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and one at MIT went ahead and did it. They hired some virtual machines to serve as targets and others to serve as attackers–and tried to get both groups hosted on the same servers at Amazon’s data centers. In the end, they succeeded in placing malicious virtual machines on the same servers as targets 40 percent of the time, all for a few dollars. While they didn’t actually steal data, the researchers said that such theft was theoretically possible. And they demonstrated how the very advantages of cloud computing–ease of access, affordability, centralization, and flexibility–could give rise to new kinds of insecurity. Amazon stressed that nobody has successfully attacked EC2 in this manner and that the company has now prevented that specific kind of assault (though, understandably, it wouldn’t specify how). But what Amazon hasn’t solved–what nobody has yet solved–is the security problem inherent in the size and structure of clouds.
Good article, worth reading in full. Also includes an interesting animation of how the exploit was carried out.
Google’s exclusive new operating system
Here’s an interesting angle on Google’s plan for its cloud-based operating system.
Google’s Chrome OS is a great idea. Put as much as possible into the cloud, and keep the physical device as a “thin client” to access this functionality. However, this great dependence on Internet connectivity has left the OS virtually useless for the vast majority of the world population, especially those who would have benefited the most from a low-cost, lightweight computer.
Now that a $100 computer is actually starting to look plausible, it’s ironic that those in true need of one won’t be able to use it. It will remain a luxury item, a secondary computer to those better off.
An even bleaker outlook: broadband
The numbers so far have been about Internet access, any kind, but to properly use a Web OS like the Chrome OS, you really need a broadband connection. This disqualifies an even larger percentage of the population. The mere thought of downloading and uploading documents and other data over an old dial-up connection makes us shiver.
So how common is broadband? Not as common as you might expect. For example, in the United States, 74.1% of the population has Internet access, but as of 2008, only 57% were accessing the Internet over a broadband connection. You could say that this makes Chrome OS unusable to 43% of the US population…
Thanks to Charles Arthur for passing on the link. Actually, there are time when I think that Chrome OS might not be too hot over my BT rural “broadband” DSL either.
The links of O’Reilly
This morning’s Observer column.
LIKE MANY people in his business, the technology publisher Tim O’Reilly is a heavy user of the Twitter microblogging service. He also has a Facebook account. To save effort, he has arranged things so that his Twitter posts are automatically forwarded to Facebook where they are transformed into ‘status updates’.
So far, so good; many of us do the same. But O’Reilly is a proper techie, which means many of his tweets are links to web pages containing interesting or useful information he has come upon in his daily browsing. One day recently, a friend of his noticed that something strange was happening to those links: when they left Twitter they were clickable links, but when they arrived in Facebook they were just plain text. In other words, they were no longer clickable. To follow them one had to copy and paste them into a browser window.
This led to a brief outbreak of conspiracy theorising…
Cloud computing in plain (well American) English
Might be useful for those pondering whether to buy Nick Carr’s The Big Switch
Greener cloud computing? I wonder
Energy consumption from data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005–from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of world total electricity consumption. That figure, which currently stands at around 1.5 percent, is expected to rise further. According to a study published in 2008 by the Uptime Institute, a datacenter consultancy based in Santa Fe, NM, it could quadruple by 2020.
“Having energy consumption go from one to three percent in five to ten years, if that goes on, we are in big trouble,” says Kenneth Brill, Uptime Institute executive director. Unless this growth is checked, greenhouse gas emissions will rise, and “the profitability of corporations will deteriorate dramatically,” he adds.
Hmmm… Not sure about the profitability angle, but the environmental issue is a real one. According to this report, Yahoo is now taking it seriously.
At any rate, its new datacentre near Buffalo, NY, includes buildings oriented to take advantage of the breeze coming off Lake Erie, with cupolas to vent hot air from racks of servers. Operators only have to switch on air-conditioning when outside temperature rises above 27 degrees.