0908: "The Cloud"

[Arancaytar]

http://www.xkcd.com/908/

Title text: "There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord."

Reminds me of the "This is the internet" scene in IT Crowd. Huh, did Randall ever leave out the title text before?

[bsphil]

Was just about to make a thread asking what happened to the title text.

[Taymon]

Huh, did Randall ever leave out the title text before?

Yes. It always shows up eventually.

[Boingloing]

I was like D: over the missing title-text.

this one was okay.

[NoOutlet]

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

[vodka.cobra]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

That's where you're wrong, as the title text is now there.

"There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord." You're welcome.

[Arancaytar]

I accidentally the whole alt!

[KShrike]

Someone always trips on the cord when you are trying to download the alt text.

[hujackus]

I looked in the source to double check the title text. I would have thought an empty string would still trigger a blank title text box to appear. I guess not.

[KShrike]

alt: "There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord."

[glasnt]

I've worked it out.

Black Hat Guy is Henry van Statten

[KShrike]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

That's where you're wrong, as the title text is now there.

"There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord." You're welcome.

Acutally, that's the fail.

THIS is the cloud (or at least, will pwn your cloud to pieces).

[hujackus]

Yay!

There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.

[blkballoon925]

This reminds me more of the South Park episode where we learn that at the core of the Internet is a giant Linksys router.

[KShrike]

So, I'm guessing (as I've been guessing) that the cloud is in fact a "Huge, amorphous network of servers somewhere".

[vodka.cobra]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

That's where you're wrong, as the title text is now there.

"There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord." You're welcome.

Acutally, that's the fail.

THIS is the cloud (or at least, will pwn your cloud to pieces).

No, that is the Kefka. You are a moron.

[Beardhammer]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

His character design looks a lot better with that weird half-jacket thing. Still not a fan of the boyish looks though.

[vodka.cobra]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

His character design looks a lot better with that weird half-jacket thing. Still not a fan of the boyish looks though.

Then again, look at what it's being compared to:

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/ ... Strife.gif

Not exactly the pinnacle of aesthetics. In fact, I think the Lego version of his design is an upgrade.

[meatyochre]

The present state of cloud computing: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/ ... 2011-04-29

Never put all your eggs in one basket.

[ysth]

"There's a lot of caching."

Burn, cheese, burn.

[Pikrass]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

That's where you're wrong, as the title text is now there.

"There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord." You're welcome.

Acutally, that's the fail.

THIS is the cloud (or at least, will pwn your cloud to pieces).

You're both wrong. THIS is the cloud. Sorry, someone had to do it.

[vodka.cobra]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

That's where you're wrong, as the title text is now there.

"There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord." You're welcome.

Acutally, that's the fail.

THIS is the cloud (or at least, will pwn your cloud to pieces).

You're both wrong. THIS is the cloud. Sorry, someone had to do it.

http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Skaia 'Nuff said.

(It was either that, or the 4chan thread where they discuss what type of clouds are in the background of a picture that was posted.)

[Brooks Hatlen]

No, THIS is the Cloud: http://rpgfansclub.files.wordpress.com/ ... /cloud.jpg

I think "accidentally" leaving out the title text might be the joke of the title text.

That's where you're wrong, as the title text is now there.

"There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord." You're welcome.

Acutally, that's the fail.

THIS is the cloud (or at least, will pwn your cloud to pieces).

You're both wrong. THIS is the cloud. Sorry, someone had to do it.

http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Skaia 'Nuff said.

(It was either that, or the 4chan thread where they discuss what type of clouds are in the background of a picture that was posted.)

Pleeeeease! These are all the cloud! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_(disambiguation)

[Whyareall]

"What is Jen doing with the internet?"

[ysth]

The present state of cloud computing: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/ ... 2011-04-29

Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Or, going to the primary source, "we need to do a better job of making highly-reliable multi-AZ deployments easy to design and operate. Some customers’ applications (or critical components of the application like the database) are deployed in only a single Availability Zone, while others have instances spread across Availability Zones but still have critical, single points of failure in a single Availability Zone. In cases like these, operational issues can negatively impact application availability when a robust multi-Availability Zone deployment would allow the application to continue without impact. We will look to provide customers with better tools to create multi-AZ applications that can support the loss of an entire Availability Zone without impacting application availability. We know we need to help customers design their application logic using common design patterns. In this event, some customers were seriously impacted, and yet others had resources that were impacted but saw nearly no impact on their applications."

[Eternal Density]

So BHG is simultaneously making fun of The Cloud and of the naive guy who will believe whatever he's told about computer stuff. 'K.

[rcox1]

I would go with IT Crowd reference over South Park. South Park is often a child eyes view of the world with an adult overtone. I think some adults do believe tech support is a tape recorder telling them to reboot the machine, and the cloud is a server in someone's basement. That is why they are so confused when asked to pay reasonable costs for service.

I like this because for all the redundancies and complex designs, all too often processes fail due to an unnoticed single point of venerability. A simple design like this could be superior to badly implemented fancy alternatives.

[Brooks Hatlen]

all too often processes fail due to an unnoticed single point of venerability.

single point of venerability.

venerability

The machinations of today's world are destroyed not by malicious intent, but by age, dignity, and character worthy of respect. --Sun Tzu

[hintss]

so my intepretation is that BHG is saying people's applications are running on his server, but due to the slow internet speeds, there is a lot of client side caching. also, he will become BOFH in the near future, and have "accidental" shutdowns.

Am I right?

[slaxor]

Anyone else get the feeling they've heard something like this before?

[WhiteAvenger]

I see. So the recent Amazon outage was indeed someone tripping over the cord.

[freyyr890]

I absolutely love this, because it helps expose all the overhyped marketing bullshit that "the cloud" is.

The cloud is the perfect marketing term: soft, indistinct, fluffy, and inviting. It's rapidly on its way to becoming the new High Definition or Web 2.0, as it's being improperly applied to just about every product imaginable. If a product somehow stores data on some server somewhere, it's now Cloud.

With the exception of actual elastic systems like Amazon E2, there's no new technology here (and elastic systems are really just VPSes that load balance nicely). They're also quite overpriced: Amazon charges $54/yr for their basic "micro" instance with two processor cores and 600 megs of RAM. For about the same price, you can get a budget OpenVZ VPS with one of the many cheap hosting companies out there with the same amount of RAM, access to 4-8 cores, and much better uptime - the most important thing of all in hosting. Plus, bandwidth is built into the cost of a VPS - Amazon charges fifteen cents per gigabyte, which will get expensive quite quickly.

tl;dr: Cloud is just more marketing kool-aid.

[Nergye]

http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Skaia 'Nuff said.

(It was either that, or the 4chan thread where they discuss what type of clouds are in the background of a picture that was posted.)

<3

Never in paradox space has there been a better cloud than those above Skaia.

['); DROP TABLE users;]

I absolutely love this, because it helps expose all the overhyped marketing bullshit that "the cloud" is.

The cloud is the perfect marketing term: soft, indistinct, fluffy, and inviting. It's rapidly on its way to becoming the new High Definition or Web 2.0, as it's being improperly applied to just about every product imaginable. If a product somehow stores data on some server somewhere, it's now Cloud.

With the exception of actual elastic systems like Amazon E2, there's no new technology here (and elastic systems are really just VPSes that load balance nicely). They're also quite overpriced: Amazon charges $54/yr for their basic "micro" instance with two processor cores and 600 megs of RAM. For about the same price, you can get a budget OpenVZ VPS with one of the many cheap hosting companies out there with the same amount of RAM, access to 4-8 cores, and much better uptime - the most important thing of all in hosting. Plus, bandwidth is built into the cost of a VPS - Amazon charges fifteen cents per gigabyte, which will get expensive quite quickly.

tl;dr: Cloud is just more marketing kool-aid.

Well, yes and no. The term "cloud" is definitely being over- and mis-used, but I wouldn't agree that it's an entirely pointless term. It's just a new way of referring to data storage on a server somewhere, which is accessible from any location with an Internet connection. I'm not sure what's wrong with that - calling it "cloud" just gives it a nice friendly name that the average person can understand.

I think the rise in the use of the term reflects an increasing use of web storage, as apps become more and more focussed on making the same data accessible everywhere. You have to call it something.

Elastic VPSes such as Amazon or Rackspace offerings are actually very useful for certain sites and applications. Sure, if you can predict exactly how much traffic you're going to have, and want to have as close to 100% uptime as possible, you're probably better off with a traditional hosting solution. But if you're developing a site or application where the server traffic is going to fluctuate rapidly, then you can actually achieve greater uptime with a flexible solution because the server wont get overloaded during a traffic spike. And if you don't need the server running 24/7 (e.g. during development), it's a lot cheaper to only pay for the 8-10 hours a day that you actually use the server.

So yeah, the word cloud is getting massively overused and overhyped, just like AJAX and Web 2.0 before it. That's unavoidable with web technologies. There'll always be a million people out there who miss the point, and marketing departments wont care about the point if they can make more sales by misrepresenting the facts. But that doesn't render the term completely meaningless. There is some actual substance behind the cloud hype.

[Invisiblemoose]

They're also quite overpriced: Amazon charges $54/yr for their basic "micro" instance with two processor cores and 600 megs of RAM. For about the same price, you can get a budget OpenVZ VPS with one of the many cheap hosting companies out there with the same amount of RAM, access to 4-8 cores, and much better uptime - the most important thing of all in hosting. .

For ~$54/yr? Where do you recommend?

[feyayeruka]

but really, isn't that how all the world's finances are structured?

[markthema3]

I find this very funny, as I just bought a server on Friday and it is hooked up EXACTLY like Black Hat has his hooked up. (Also, I got a server with 2 Xeons for $40 )

~snip~

For ~$54/yr? Where do you recommend?

At your buddy's house who has a super fast internet connection. Just buy your own server. I got mine at a Tech Club computer sale at my local high school. I would recommend either something like that, yard sales, or estate sales.

[JustMe]

As I googled something the other day, I realized my memory is in the cloud.
Which is great until my internet goes down.

[VaebnKehn]

If the cloud stores information on people talking about and describing the cloud: does that make the cloud self-aware?

[McHell]

Excellent comic... I've always had a creeping feeling like that. Amazon's cloud seems to be like that, going for a liedown in one block.

"Huge, amorphous network of servers" would be more menacing as a "huge, amphibious network of servers" or worrying as a "huge, amorous network of servers somewhere".