27 November, 2008

Are we all heading towards an era of cloud computing?

NO. Heres 8 reasons why:

1. Providing Mario, or for that matter any modern graphic intense game, as a service wont be easy.

2. If you’re NEVER going to use the computing power in your PC, and would rather rely on some server for processing your information, do you think major hardware vendors such as Intel, and AMD, who have spent billions to develop their hardware, would just standby and watch?

3. One MAJOR problem with cloud computing is that if, and when the central server crashes, ALL of your data would be lost, because of the failure. It wouldn’t matter if you have backup servers. They could not take in ALL of the traffic resulting in slower transfers. This would be unacceptable for large companies depending on the central server to provide it with certain programming “services”, and for your 9 year old son who wants to play DOOM 3.

4. 82% of the world is still using dialup connections to connect to the internet. What could possibly compel them to change that? And if they decided to change that, even for some unknown reason, would the costs be the same? Wouldn’t it be higher? Wouldn’t this would compel most of them to stay on the same infrastructure?

5. Programmers are humans too. We aren’t perfect. We couldn’t possibly come up with a mechanism that would go online throughout the world providing “services” to everyone involved, AND expect the system to be robust enough to NEVER crash. Even a primitive system, designed for this purpose would probably end up crashing because of the load involved.

6. If you think Im being a pessisimist, and Im making this up, consider this- Even a complex backend architecture such as server farms, possibly coupled with complex algorithms to optimize performance, do you think the access time would be anywhere near, or comparable to a file stored on your system?

7. If you do everything on a server, then why do you need your PC? Just input devices, and output devices will suffice in such a situation right? Then your PC wouldn’t be a “terminal” it would be a dummy terminal.

8. Finally, the security threat involved is totally unacceptable for any major corporation. As all “services” run on a central server(or on different servers, which ever you deem necessary for the purpose of this discussion) even a small loophole could prove costly for all those involved in such an endeavor.


What makes you think that distributed could ever be stopped? Lets hear them in the comments !

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