Nice, but no so "cloudy" [LWN.net]

Nice, but no so "cloudy"

Posted Jan 5, 2012 7:02 UTC (Thu) by eyal (subscriber, #949)
Parent article: ownCloud moves ahead

A "cloud" service implies high availability and high reliability, as behind the scenes the cloud is based on multiple servers, storage devices, network connections, etc.

My understanding is that ownCloud is simply a file sharing web application. It appears to be good, relies on accepted open standards, open source and fast evolving. But I don't see a "cloud" element.

To make ownCloud a true cloud, it should provide means to make the data distributed and synchronized over several instances.

For example, have a "main" instance installed on a premium web hosting or VPS provider, a backup instance on a cheap hosting provider, and another on a home PC.

Eyal.

(Log in to post comments)

Nice, but no so "cloudy"

Posted Jan 5, 2012 14:54 UTC (Thu) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655) [Link]

"Cloud" really is just a marketing term for virtual networked services, something that almost everybody has been doing for years but which now have been defined as a concept.

And you are correct that the term "cloud" often implies things like redundancy, high availability, clustering and such, but just the possibility of those is all you need to declare something a "cloud". In this case you could just make sure this thing is hosted on a system that provides these things and your done.
You can do even better and host the separate parts (database, webfrontend, ..) in different parts of a "cloud". You can run multiple frontends for loadbalancing. I haven't looked at the internals, but with a little twist multiple installs would be easily splittable over multiple database instances for added scalability through partitioning. That's just one indirection away. You only have to do it on a system basis, but "cloud" terminology doesn't really signify on which level you provide these possibly implied perks.