Technology I'm sick of hearing about

[Bunk]

You don't use netflix?
Amazon prime?
Channel 4 on demand?
Amazon?
GitHub?
BitBucket?
Evernote?
Spotify?

Personally I'm not interested in 3D printing, but the cloud is very relevant to me - and it also makes me rather a lot of money

Netflix? It's Owly remember, I think he's only just switched to VHS

[FatLazyContractor]

Netflix? It's Owly remember, I think he's only just switched to VHS

He seems to live a very expensive life ...

[filthy1980]

SoMoLo

[NickyBoy]

I see. What does that mean? Why is it different from being hosted on the public Internet?

The cloud is all about shared dynamic use of distributed resources.

A web site can be hosted on a single machine. All well and good but if you are physically distant from that server, or if the machine the server is sitting on goes down, you will have access problems. If a lot of people try to access the site at the same time, it will chug down to being almost unusable or seize up altogether.

A web site can also be hosted on the cloud so that (under the surface) it is distributed across multiple nodes around the world as demand dictates. You are highly unlikely not to be near one of the nodes hosting it and a catastrophe of sufficient scale to eliminate the hardware supporting that web site would need to also be big enough to destroy a significant portion of the human race. The number of nodes assigned to it can also dynamically scale as demand dictates, allowing it to run equally well when 1 person or 1 million people are accessing it.

This is very important for high-bandwidth internet based services (a few of which have already been listed in this thread). A lot of services that anyone not approaching retirement age takes for granted, just would not work without the cloud overcoming the technical problems of access, redundancy and scalability on the fly.

[Benny]

A web site can also be hosted on the cloud so that (under the surface) it is distributed across multiple nodes around the world as demand dictates. You are highly unlikely not to be near one of the nodes hosting it and a catastrophe of sufficient scale to eliminate the hardware supporting that web site would need to also be big enough to destroy a significant portion of the human race.

Until it goes wrong - Amazon's huge EC2 cloud services crash permanently destroyed some data.

Cue tech heads response...

[tomtomagain]

Until it goes wrong - Amazon's huge EC2 cloud services crash permanently destroyed some data.

Cue tech heads response...

Yeah 'cos data has never been lost on servers hosted inside a companies office.

[NickyBoy]

Until it goes wrong - Amazon's huge EC2 cloud services crash permanently destroyed some data.

Cue tech heads response...

None of their hardware died (so it doesn't really relate to what I said :P )

This was caused by three things hitting at once

-bad backup procedures
-Engineer incompetence during an upgrade
-a bug in their software

A similar perfect storm of combined errors would wipe out all the data for a non-cloud service.

One of their engineers managed to goof and internally isolate an entire section of nodes from the network. Said nodes couldn't access sufficient backup facilities to store all their information, so a small sliver of data within them was lost. At the same time bugs in Amazons cloud software caused other nodes to start freaking out due to not being able to access the isolated nodes, causing them to bring down other services (without data loss).

No tech is 100% resistant to bad implementation, human stupidity and poor development.

[OwlHoot]

Netflix? It's Owly remember, I think he's only just switched to VHS

There's a lot of truth in that

[OwlHoot]

He seems to live a very expensive life ...

Wow Impressive! Yes, it's about time I upgraded to one of those Bad Boys

[FatLazyContractor]

Serpently is:

Panasonic DMR-EZ49vEBK Super Multi Format Combi Recorder with Freeview: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics

Holy feck!