[governance] FW: [CIResearch-SA] Cloud Computing

[Michael Gurstein]

A very thoughtful reflection on experience with "cloud computing" from a
community informatics perspective (that strongly supports Parminder's
earlier thoughts...
 
Thanks Rean!
 
MBG
 
-----Original Message-----
From: ci-research-sa-owner at vancouvercommunity.net
[mailto:ci-research-sa-owner at vancouvercommunity.net] On Behalf Of Rean van
der Merwe
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2009 11:57 AM
To: ci-research-sa at vancouvercommunity.net
Subject: Re: [CIResearch-SA] Cloud Computing


A few thoughts on the buzz of "cloud computing" from first hand experience -
and I hope the ideas are more than tech-speak ...  
Nothing that means to be conclusive, just a few "stones in the bush". 

We run a few dedicated internet servers that support community websites, and
were very interested in the idea. The principles, more than the geek-ness,
were what attracted.
In theory, we could replace the physical, sometimes troublesome machine we
had in a room at a local service provider, with a small share in an almost
infinite "cloud" of  machines. To think through the benefits, the  nearest
analogy I could make was the difference between one full time person, and a
group of part timers doing work. If the full time person stops what they do,
output drops to zero. In a group, if any one stops, it has a small impact on
output - particularly if the rest seamlessly take over the shortfall. Better
than that - we could expand and contract the virtual "workforce" to meet
immediate requirements, again seamlessly. So if we suddenly required extra
work to be done, we would not have to formally contract another worker - the
group would simply allocate more resource to us.

And all this for lower cost than our own machine!

The practical reality explains why we still have a real machine in a room -
at the end of the cloud market where most of us operate, the idea creates a
virtual "tragedy of the commons."  

This larger group of workers, in computing terms, the "cloud" of servers,
were also great from the service providers point of view. They could
allocate tasks so that the cloud as a whole, the workforce, were constantly
at optimum capacity. In practice, our sites performed as if they were under
"load" 24/7 - everything was constant, but slow. Since our sites were not
resource hungry, the arrangement meant that we were effectively constantly
allocating some of our resource to folk that were abusing the situation.
When I looked at the discussion forums of several large providers of cloud
services, I found my experience was not unique. Most who cared about the
responsiveness of their service were soon leaving the clouds.

A second experience brought a more worrying aspect of the cloud idea home to
me. That internet services are constantly being aggregated upwards. In other
words, we are relying on larger and larger organisations to provide the
services we have come to be dependant on. Organisations that are effectively
accountable to themselves only, to the income of their share holders. Only
mass protest has the impact to shift them - but protest we rely on their
services to be able to make...
My practical experience - we paid for a service from Google to filter spam
in our email system, the same filter used in Google mail. When we ran into
trouble, I naturally mailed tech support thinking we'd be up and running in
no time....but got no response. Two years, near a dozen attempts later, we
have basically given up and written off the money. The nearest thing to a
response was an automated email directing us to yet another inhuman
interface.

It was a thrill when folk realised the internet could take on all sorts of
power and bureaucracy to potentially build a more pragmatically democratic
society. I fear that in the place of these earlier bureaucracies, with civic
minded constitutions imperfect as they are, we are cheering along something
altogether more worrying. Facebook is now by some definitions the largest
"community" on earth, but a community all the same that is traded as stock
for profit. We read recently about Skype potentially being shut down because
of a dispute over intellectual property - the developers did not sell rights
to the underlying technology to eBay when they traded the brand - the
company and its community of users.

I'll stop here - the mail is starting to read like a blog post. But the
ideas hopefully relevant to CI and enthusiasm about the cloud.
I liked the much more coherent take on the topic here:
http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/index.cgi?table_of_contents

Rean

On 26 Sep 2009, at 07:37, Michael Gurstein wrote:


Good question Margaret--the short answer is computing where the software
(and data) does not reside on the local computer but in some central data
bank and is accessed as and when needed for us. Gmail is a good example of
computing from the "cloud".

M






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