The Cloud (come back to earth and reality)

Everyone's talking about The Cloud, the hype around it is incredible. It is the new frontier, the new killer-app. If you are not "in The Cloud", you are nowhere.

The Cloud concept is quite old. The general idea is that your computer, laptop, tablet delegates some of its functionality on external servers housed somewhere by someone that is giving you a service. Hotmail and Gmail could be considered a cloud email services. You don't have an email server at home, you don't have (or at least don't need) an email client in your PC. Your emails aren't even stored in your PC, all is hosted and handled by Microsoft's  or Google's servers and you only need a web explorer to access it.

So why all the hype about it?

We all have seen this image at work. Someday (it always happens sooner or later) internet connection is lost. For several hours you can't get email and you can't surf the web!!! Your life turns miserable. Without email it is obvious that your boss can't expect you to work or do anything useful!! Some people even run through the office crying about apocalypse... the IT Director is crouching in a corner with his right hand on his ear (Rainman-style) mumbling something about its not his fault... hell is loose.

I may be exaggerating but the truth is that without email it seems people can work any longer (and the IT guys get a couple of shouts).  Now just imagine that ALL your systems were "cloud" based. No access to the company's accounting. No access to Word/Excel/Powerpoint cloud-based apps. This time it would really mean that there is nothing to do.

The concept behind cloud computing is nice, the idea is great but there is still a long way to go to get to the place where it will be an acceptable solution for our needs. I use Dropbox and now I also use iCloud as cloud-storage services. I find the iPhone's new automatic backup service quite useful. I've been reading about the new services of cloud-synchronization that iOS5 is giving to game developers (I guess that to any iOS & Mac developer but it seems that game developers will be the first ones to take advantage of it) and I find it a good use of the cloud. But still it all seems more a file hosting service than a real cloud-computing service.

The first thing I've seen that made me think "wow, this is a good way to use cloud computing" is Silk, the new Amazon Browser for Kindle Fire. What Amazon does is handle all navigation in their servers, the dozens of connections that a web client makes to different web servers when trying to "paint" a page on screen (you get the web frame and text content from one place, ads from a different or several different ones, cookie counters from another, google analytics, Facebook "I like" and followers icons... etc, etc.). So Amazon pre-processes all of that and simplifies the connection with the client so that all complexity resides in the Amazon servers and little processing is left for the client. I havent tried yet it (Kindle Fire not available yet) but the idea sounds great.

I'm sure there are many other good solutions for the Cloud out there... but the same way Virtualization was a great idea but it took Vmware & others years to have a solution that IT departments would adopt for their systems, Cloud computing still needs some time to mature. I don't doubt it is the future, but not the present (yet).