title: Homework 01 - Cloud computing introduction

Homework - Cloud computing introduction

The three excerpts below are from the paper

The Utility of Cloud Computing As a New Pricing and Consumption Model for Information Technology, David C. Wyld, International Journal of Database Management Systems (IJDMS), Vol.1, No.1, November 2009.

The paper was published in 2009, but its content is still relevant.

Explain the meaning of the sentences in bold. Do not simply translate into French or re-write with different words. You should explain the idea that the author wanted to develop.

Do not use more than three lines for each answer.

Excerpt 1, page 3:

What we see today - on campuses, in coffee shops, in train stations, and in the park – is that we are increasingly communicating, storing, interacting and working via cloud-based services. People today are indisputably showing a willingness to put more and more of their lives and the information online, “sacrificing privacy to save time and money”. Thus, it is a personal calculus that we all make as to how much we engage in cloud computing offerings for our personal lives, trading privacy for ubiquitous, “easier” computing.

Excerpt 2, page 4:

The Economist captured the meaning of this trend in stating: “The plethora of devices wirelessly connected to the Internet will speed up a shift that is already under way: from a ‘device-centric’ to an ‘information-centric’ world....(and) as wireless technology gets better and cheaper, more and more different kinds of objects will connect directly to the cloud.” Technology guru Clay Shirky perhaps put it best when he said: “What is driving this shift is a change in perspective from seeing the computer as a box to seeing the computer as a door”. The cloud-computing paradigm is thus based on a “user-centric interface that makes the cloud infrastructure supporting the applications transparent to user”. Some have speculated that the functionality of cloud computing “could even render the personal computer obsolete”, as we move to what has been described as an “application-centric” world.

Excerpt 3, page 4:

At the turn of the century, for manufacturing plants and other large facilities to have electrical power, they had to generate their own electricity through small generators or be located near a water source that could operate a waterwheel. Take for instance a brewery operating a hundred years ago. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels famously put it: “They had to be experts in electricity to brew beer. Something is off there. These guys couldn't wait to dump their own generators and start to use electricity from other companies”.