Downside Of The Cloud

Click for Josh Fruhlinger's article at HuffPo entitled The Cloud: No Sir, I Don't Like It.

On my first day as a freshman at UC San Diego, I was handed a login and password to use for email, file storage, and general Internet access on the university's UNIX systems. Every day I would log in, browse Usenet, troll about on IRC, save files to my personal directory, and access them from elsewhere. I thought it was great, and I loved being able to save an in-progress paper to the account from a lab and then log in later to finish it from my dorm room.

Then one night as I was set to finish a Political Science paper, I couldn't log in. "We're sorry, the servers are down for maintenance. Please try later."

"But... you have my paper!" I whisper-screamed.

I spent that night waiting for the paper-hostage-holding servers to come back online. Thankfully, around 4:00am, they popped back up, and I quickly moved the file to a 3.5-inch floppy where it was safe.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was using the cloud, and I didn't like it. Heck, it ate my paper.

This was 1990, by the way. Yes, the cloud was around then.

More after the jump.

Fruhlinger recognizes the value of the cloud: He mentions Netflix, Pandora, and Dropbox approvingly. And then there are things like Open Office: No $500 software purchase from Microsoft necessary. More software tools and more ingenious uses for the cloud are being introduced all the time.

But there have been cloud disasters ("storm clouds," he calls them).

Without Googling, I can think of a few: Microsoft / Danger's Sidekick outage of 2009 that resulted in thousands of users' lost contact lists, last week's Playstation Network outage that saw 70 million users' private information go into hackers' hands, and most recently Amazon's EC2 service outage. And then there was that time in 2008 when Blizzard's World of Warcraft servers went down and my Druid was rolled back an entire level. I lost some seriously epic gear.

Fruhlinger goes on to say that when storage was expensive, the value of the cloud was obvious. But at $80 for a 2-terabyte drive? Not so much.

So why do people love it? They say it's a) convenient, b) productive, and c) perpetual.

He goes on to minimize the good features of these three points.

Convenience: Access your music collection? He has 7,000 songs on his iPhone, and he can listen to them on a wi-fi-free plane. And you don't want to depend on a cloud download for that important business presentation: Keep it locked up securely on your laptop.

Productivity: What if your Internet connection goes down right before your important deadline?

Perpetual: What if you buy a new computer with a faster processor and GPU that could use new applications and workflows, but the information you uploaded to the cloud was from older hardware, and you can't take advantage of your new, powerful features? Your applications will only run with the features and at the speed of the most low-tech element of your system.

Cloud computing makes sense for some applications, and I'm not about to say we should give up on it completely. I'm a huge fan of private clouds: home networks that allow media streaming and file sharing across computers along with secured access from afar. I also share files with people while getting things done -- that's the nature of the network. Do I think the cloud is an ultimate replacement for local storage? Heck no. I will never trust my media collection to someone else's hands where it can go offline, be analyzed by nosey marketers, or even completely disappear. It belongs in my hands where I can flip through it in real time.

We've come full circle. No, wait: we're going backwards. We started out with VT100 text-based UNIX logins because it was necessary. We matured to personal computers with local drives. But now we're so into the idea of the cloud that we're thinking we should put everything there. Are we gearing up for the perfect storm?