[Siva7891]

Hi Everyone..
I am well aware that Gmail, Google docs, SkyDrive and Adrive are cloud services I am using those services except Google Docs.
When I saw website of Windows Azure they mentioned something like compute, storage, Data transfers, Relational Database, Appfabric Caching etc.I have few questions

• Why we do computing in cloud rather than doing in our own physical sysytem?
  
• Companies are storing database(for storing passwords) in the their web hosting server for years, What is the need now to have those in cloud?
  
• What's AppFabric Caching?

What's the overall advantage for an company to participate in cloud computing?

This post has been edited by Siva7891: 13 June 2011 - 09:21 PM

[modi123_1]

#1 - universal and less down time.
#2 - see #1.
#3 - http://msdn.microsof...y/ee790954.aspx

[Siva7891]

modi123_1, on 13 June 2011 - 10:43 PM, said:

#1 - universal and less down time.
#2 - see #1.
#3 - http://msdn.microsof...y/ee790954.aspx

I have very little knowledge about data centers and all. How could we achieve less down time when we shift our data to cloud. If we kept the servers in our own infrastructure we can maintain it at our will know. What if we kept our data in the cloud and had network problems due to some accidents or catastrophic failure at the infrastructure of Cloud service provider. Recently heard the G-Mail servers are crashes and emails belonging to 150,000 accounts have been lost.

[creativecoding]

Of course it helps to have a local backup on your machines as well as a backup on the cloud. Honestly, the cloud is nothing more than some servers with a special name to make it sound cool and unique. But really, would you rather have a professional, large company like Microsoft or Google manage your server hardware? Besides, you will save money too. And as long as you backup your website every once in awhile you should be fine if your host screws something up and loses everything (however if that does happen I would probably switch host).

[modi123_1]

Less downtime in that you have professional folk running the hardware in specialized centers. I mean that's THEIR JOB. Not like your average data center worker who has a few hundred different balls to juggle the cloud people are super trained.

You make the assumption that if it's done in house it's done right. I can tell you that is rarely the case. Poor hardware choices, limited hardware budgets, people will questionable skills, the occasional janitor that unplugs the power cord to some archaic (but mission critical) box so they can plug in the vacuum, internal power struggles over resources, and so on.

Sure having the data on the cloud could suffer from some catastrophic issue, but I would wager the failures in house would average more.

Basically you can cut out a whole group of people and hardware concerns out of your equation. It's akin to any other system or service you can slough off to someone else. Web hosting comes to mind. Sure you could pay for the hardware, bandwidth, maintenance, upgrades, knowledgeable folk to maintain all of that or you can shell out a fraction of the cost to a host somewhere and update just the web docs as needed.

[Curtis Rutland]

Quote

Honestly, the cloud is nothing more than some servers with a special name to make it sound cool and unique.

That's not entirely true. They are special servers. They're virtualized in a way that you can rapidly stand up new instances with just software, mirror your applications across them, and load-balance on demand. They're designed for redundancy. Also, they're strategically placed, so you can spawn instances in "zones". If you're getting more traffic from the north east, spawn an instance in that region so they get shorter response times.

Quote

If we kept the servers in our own infrastructure we can maintain it at our will know. What if we kept our data in the cloud and had network problems due to some accidents or catastrophic failure at the infrastructure of Cloud service provider.

What if you kept your servers in your own building and had a catastrophic fire? The difference is that cloud services have an SLA that guarantees certain uptime, and are responsible for backing up their servers. If they fail, it's going to cost them money, since they have an agreement with you.

It's like a warranty. Is it worth the peace of mind that comes knowing your data and uptime is insured, vs the peace of mind knowing that your data is in a server that you can walk over to and touch? Who's to say? That's up to you.