Cloud Computing: Follow-up

I received a couple of follow-up email messages on the last post and want to share the author's additional insights. The responses are listed below as received.

From Justin Dugger: I appreciate concept, but these examples aren’t really highlighting the “compute” in cloud computing.

A better example might be Replacing a Pixar renderfarm with Amazon’s EC2 service (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). EC2 allows you to basically rent time on Amazon’s massive cloud, and do so on demand. For example, you might when a computer modeling class wants to render a scene, rather than buy a few dozen computers that sit idle, you might buy time on EC2 and use a few thousand computers for a brief moment instead. When it’s done, those computers become part of the “cloud” again.

EC2 is marketed towards websites, where “flashcrowds” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_crowd) can overwhelm organizations not expecting a sudden spike in popularity. By using EC2, you can snap up more computers and bandwidth instantaneously to serve that traffic, and relinquish it when it dies down.

Cloud computing or not, your point about data loss and security on the web is well worth highlighting. There’s an New Yorker cartoon about the internet: “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog). The same goes for people who run websites. Ma.gnolia [ma.gnolia.com/] ran an online bookmark service essentially out of someone’s basement on a PowerMac, and failed to institute a solid backup procedure and in the end lost every user’s bookmarks. For bookmarks, perhaps nothing of value was lost, but if Zotero were to suffer a similar fate I think many users would be in outrage.

In fact, Zotero stores your data locally rather than in the cloud, and Zotero publishes guidelines for making backups of your data (http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data). I think this example highlights the dangers: how can you be sure your work is safe if it’s hard to even know where it’s stored?

From Keith Krieger: I would suggest that the use of distributed computing resources to only process data is somewhat restrictive.

*Anything* that could be handled with a thin client, from tagging photos with Flickr to manipulating those photos with Adobe’s online version of Photoshop constitutes cloud computing. Or how about adding a Twitter post with a cell phone? Not much computing involved, but very much using the cloud of distributed data processing to interact with other users and data.

And the issue of security seems to arise when considering data in the cloud. We somehow forget about the 1000s of laptops lost or stolen each year, and the breaches of corporate and government data stores that have exposed many SSNs and credit card numbers. Data that is *not* in the cloud seems to be at as much risk as data in the cloud.

As for data loss, I used to be a ma.gnolia user. However, I think that was a disclosure problem rather than a data loss problem. If Larry Haff(Halff? sources differ) had disclosed that ma.gnolia was running on a computer in his basement, I’m thinking that people might have used the service with a different level of expectation, and backed up their data appropriately.

Then again, how many users back up their data appropriately to begin with? Ask people if they have a backup of their digital camera images. The numbers aren’t encouraging.

Cloud Computing--Second Horizon Report 2009 Trend

The Second major trend identified by the Horizon Report 2009 (http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2009-Horizon-Report.pdf) that is expected to effect higher education is “Cloud Computing.” The horizon timeline for this trend is 1 year or less…so it’s predicted to be an imminent educational trend. The Horizon Report’s opening statement on this trend follows:

The emergence of very large “data farms” — specialized data centers that host thousands of servers — has created a surplus of computing resources that has come to be called the cloud. Growing out of research in grid computing, cloud computing transforms once-expensive resources like disk storage and processing cycles into a readily available, cheap commodity. Development platforms layered onto the cloud infrastructure enable thin-client, web-based applications for image editing, word processing, social networking, and media creation. Many of us use the cloud, or cloud-based applications, without even being aware of it. Advances in computer science to ensure redundancy and protection from natural disasters have led to data being shared across many different hosting facilities. Improved infrastructure has made the cloud robust and reliable; as usage grows, the cloud is fundamentally changing our notions of computing and communication.

Perhaps some clarification might help in understanding this trend. With all the talk of “data farms” and “development platforms layered onto the cloud infrastructure,” cloud computing simply refers to the use of Internet-based (called the "cloud") software and storage. The essence of cloud computing means you can create and store content (documents, images, and so on) on the web rather than on your computer using web-based software rather than software installed on your local computer.

Cloud computing incorporates the concept of software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, technology trends where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for access to computing power and meeting your computing needs. The best know example of cloud computing is Google Apps which provides common business applications online that are accessed using a web browser. The products created by Google Apps are documents stored online, not on your local hard drive (although those documents may be downloaded and used locally or distributed, just as you would any other document).

Additional examples of cloud computing include:

• Free online storage sites such as those listed at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_online_storage_services.php
• Photo storage and sharing (see Flickr at http://www.flickr.com).
• Video storage and sharing (see YouTube at http://www.youtube.com).
• Photo and video editing applications (see http://www.splashup.com for photos and http://www.jaycut.com for videos).
• Personal online journaling (see Blogger at http://www.blogger.com).
• Publishing of presentations and slide shows (see http://www.slideshare.net or http://www.sliderocket.com).
• Online citation generation and management software such as Zotero (see http://www.zotero.org/). Zotero is an automatic citation capture tool that works in your browser (only Firefox at this time) and enables you to annotate, export, and grab meta-data on resources that you may want to cite later (supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and George Mason University).

An interesting side effect of cloud computing is the proposition that telecommuting is “dead” and superseded by a growing cadre of Cloudworkers. For an interesting view, check out the Cloudworker’s Blog at http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/10/23/the-cloudworkers-creed/.

One negative of cloud computing is the fact that (in the words of the Horizon Report 2009) “entrusting your work and data to the cloud is also a commitment of trust that the service provider will continue to be there, even in face of changing market and other conditions.” In other words, what happens if the “cloud vendor” ceases to exist? Data security is another issue: how safe and private is your data.

These issues, for many institutions of higher education, are superseded by the cost issue. Cloud computing applications are typically free.

What's the Buzz - Innovation & Technological Trends

In a Technology Brown Bag session (held at JCCC on Wednesday, February 25, 2009), Marziah Karch, Keith Krieger and I tried to focus on what's new, what's old, what's hot, and what's trendy in instructional technology. Our belief is that innovation in instruction often has its genesis in that moment of epiphany that follows exposure to a new "trend" or idea. So we focused on discussing new technological trends based on the Horizon Report 2009 by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE.

This year’s Horizon Report 2009 lists 6 “big” new trends including:

1. Mobile devices
2. Cloud computing
3. Geo-everything
4. The personal web
5. Semantic-aware applications, and
6. Smart objects.

Over the next several days, we’ll focus on each of these trends and share specific examples of tools and applications that fall under each trend. If you’re impatient, you can view the entire report (in PDF file format) at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2009-Horizon-Report.pdf.

You can also view a video/slideshow that records when the report was presented at EDUCAUSE (53 minutes in length) at http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted5/Viewer/?peid=ac311d35918948468f92deab20379246 (or http://tinyurl.com/8uh9ss).

Keep in mind that the Horizon Report 2009 identifies:

• The top 6 predictions for technologies that will be adopted in higher education,
• Provides a timeline for the anticipated adoption (ranging from less than a year to four-five years),
• Provides current examples of how the trends are being used, and
• Allows readers to participate by adding additional examples through the use of social bookmarking (uses delicious, see http://delicious.com/tag/hz09 but you can also view just the bookmarks for each trend – I’ll share those links as we go along).

More to follow...