Changing definitions of the cloud? As far as I can tell the only definitions of the cloud that ever existed were basically:
1. On the Internet in a general sense. Somehow "cloud" became synonymous with Internet for many people and I can't figure out why. The weird part is that people who use "cloud" to mean Internet also use the term Internet to describe the same services the "cloud" offers. To me this makes me think marketing made this so. Somehow Dropbox is a cloud service but gmail (or hotmail or whatever email provider) is on the Internet according to many. How is that?
2. Definition 2 is basically the same as 1 but more specific. People use "cloud" to refer to anything connected to a server except you access the server through a service and all the specifics like hostnames and such are abstracted away. Like iCloud for Mac.
I just don't get all the fuss about the Cloud and I'm glad there's someone else out there that scoffs when they hear the term. How is Amazon EC2 "in the cloud"? As far as I can tell its a VPS with some neat scaling features. How is Heroku and other app hosting services "in the cloud"? Again, what I see is VPS hosting with even more abstraction on top of Amazon's abstraction.
Whenever I did freelance development work for people they'd ask if the hosting I offered was in the cloud. First off, why does that matter (well the people who ask for it claim it's better but can't explain why)? Second, what does that even mean? If it means will your site be hosted on a server connected to the Internet then yeah I suppose you can cal it the cloud.
About a year ago I noticed some copy on MediaTemple's page for either their (ve) or (dve) hosting offerings that say something to the effect of "some people call it the cloud but we prefer to think of it as... (some very same logical explanation here)". I was happy to see it because in the end, as far as I can tell there's no difference between the cloud and one or more servers accessible via the Internet.
Maybe to non-technical people having their information and data available across all devices by syncing with a remote server is novel and can only be understood by using the cloud metaphor. To them, the "cloud" is this vague thing on the internets that's all knowing and always available that's the next revolution in computing. To me it's just a client and server connecting and exchanging data. It's been there since I was a kid. The only difference is that now my phone, my car, and even my fridge can connect to it (for some strange reason) but its still just a damn server like we've had since before 56k modems.
Somehow Dropbox is a cloud service but gmail (or hotmail or whatever email provider) is on the Internet according to many. How is that?
--This is exactly it. I think internet is just converging to cloud, because evrything is becoming more hybridiZed. also, datasets are getting larger, so local storage needs to be larger. but thats hard to carry around in a secure way (raid, etc). So, distributed/redundant storage makes sense. But then I want to have mobile access. device is low power/32gb etc. so again, need to rely on distributed storage to enable mobility, not just scale/security. I also think we see this with web-pages themselves. Not pulling from a "server" only, but pulling from all over multiple datasources (ad networks, etc). Easier to just call this distributed storage/hybrid data sourcing "cloud" to avoid wasting thought onn the details (every case different/unknowable). It's a bit of a moving target, then, as to what (if anything) a "cloud" XYZ is.
