Page 45 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind
P. 45
2
THE AMORPHOUS
CLOUD
Native Americans had no trouble believing that creatures
from the spiritual world roamed at will among those of the
physical. At night, these visitors became shape shifters, trans-
forming themselves from the coyote, the bear, or the raven
into a spirit form, then changing back again at daybreak.
Cloud computing is nothing if not similarly amorphous.
The cloud’s hard-edged, warehouse-sized data centers acces-
sible on the Internet, filled with seven-foot-tall racks of pizza-
box servers, seem concrete enough. But when an individual
end user accesses a server in the cloud, the server has the abil-
ity to take on or shed processing cycles from CPUs and use
more memory or less, as needed. The user’s cloud machine
25
