I host this site on a VPS from DigitalOcean. Great prices, great speed, great value. I’m very happy with them.
If/when I build a Rails app or need some sort of backend for an iOS app, I’ll probably look at a Cloud platform like Heroku or maybe even another VPS just to keep things simple.
I understand that “The Cloud”, as it is most often called (and I’ll stop using the quotes), is an exciting thing but it isn’t new. It also isn’t the death of hardware. If anything, it is a change of the hardware that normal people need to keep around in order to get something done.
The Cloud is hardware, somewhere. It isn’t necessarily in your house, but there is a physical box somewhere that needs to be setup and maintained so that your information isn’t lost and so that you can get at it fast enough. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
This enables devices to be smaller, do less, and have other advantages (like longer battery life) that matter to consumers more now than in the past. That is a good thing. The Cloud, however, does not replace the need for hardware.
It just changes it.
2 replies on “The Cloud is not The End”
The need for hardware will never go away. But the requirement for each individual, location or company to put substantial capital towards infrastructure and maintenance can be offset when considering the cloud. Uptime, collocation, disaster recovery, high-availability and my favorite, self-provisioning; these are reasons I love the cloud. It’ll just keep getting better, AWS (Amazon) has definitely shown that.
I think we’re in the “cowboy” era of The Cloud right now. All of the data going out to many players, but in the future I would expect a move back as well, The Cloud living in our own homes but being accessed via high-speed networks from around the globe.
Maybe. The other issue is that with the shift away from trying to tie as much power into personal computing devices, other stuff can be emphasized … like looking at the iPad.