Sub-second Responses Regardless of Load

Back to this again, which I believe sums up the benefit of cloud computing to end users pretty well - sub second response times regardless of load. It was only by going virtual that we could achieve this, of course, since before that every computer required its own box. Virtualization was the big breakthrough that cloud computing so adroitly exploits. To me, cloud computing has every bit of the same excitement as the Web itself - possibilities have suddenly multiplied while the number of physical resources required will actually shrink.

If you ask me it means that computers are finally going to have to WORK for a living and I say it's about time! The average server has a lot more horsepower than the mainframes of old and is almost always doing nothing but listening to port 80 and waiting for something to do. Not so with cloud computing - those computers are doing real work, since they wouldn't have even been summoned into being had there not been a demand for extra capacity.

I am still confused about what Microsoft and Google are doing with their cloud computing initiatives. It seems to be all about application hosting somehow, and we've had that in some form or other for eons. What we haven't had is the ability to clone another instance on demand to share in the workload, which is a much more powerful concept.

The net result of this will be that a lot fewer computers requiring a lot less space and power will be doing far more work than all the ones that presently exist are doing now. All the "workhorse" apps that many people rely on will run on the cloud instead of company-owned data centers or mainframes. Anything that is tailored to the individual will run on the desktop, notebook, smart phone, etc.

Makes perfect sense to me!