"The Cloud." Someone explain it.

[The_Scrivener]

I understand it in the most vague intangible way possible. I've read about it. But I still don't understand how it is different from just having a server.

Can someone elaborate? Extra points for an easyass metaphor.

 

[Wyvern65]

A server is like a referee and a mirror combined.

The mirror part: On your console you shot JoeGamer. The server gets that message and sends it out to everyone else who is playing: "Hey everyone, Scrivener just fragged JoeGamer. Update all your graphics and the world state to reflect this." The actual work of doing that updating is done by your console.

The referee part: Make sure everyone who joins the game is playing by the same rules (eg doesn't have a hacked client or something.)


Cloud computing is completely different. It's like having another computer attached to yours to help do extra work. Doesn't matter if the game is single player or multi.

Your console: I want to figure out this thing and it will take a ton of calculations. I'll get my buddy MrCloud to do half the work for me and shoot it back to me via an e-mail. This means I only have to do half the work.

A bit oversimplified, but that's essentially it.

 

[wintercoat]

A server is like a switchboard, relaying information. The cloud is like a temp worker hired on by a company to spread the workload out.

 

[Coldie]

Cloud is where the servers live, so the difference between "a server" and "cloud" is scale.

To be a little more specific, "cloud" is a huge server cluster/farm with a generic interface that allows the developers to claim as many servers as they can afford to do any task they want. Once created, the virtual server instance they get can be used for any task, like any physical server, but unlike a physical server you just discard it when you don't have any work to do.

In other words:
Physical server: it's all yours. You pay for it, you maintain it, you use it for anything you want. If you don't have any work, too bad, you still pay the bills. If you have too much work, too bad, wait for the existing servers to handle it or buy another server and install it and when you don't need it anymore, you're stuck with it.
Cloud: someone else has a gazillion servers and they are offering you their processing power, for a price. You create a virtual server, use it to handle your work, usually paying for things like net traffic, disk space, the amount of processing power you need for the time you need them. Not enough work? Discard the virtual server to stop paying. Too much work? Add another instance and pay a little more to handle your workload faster.

What the Xbone will use The Infinite Power of the Cloud for? In theory, anything the developers would want to use a server for, but without having to buy their own servers, only rent them from the cloud. Persistent MMO-like worlds, multiplayer, marketing buzzwords, DRM, stuff like that.

 

[The_Scrivener]

So the Cloud is like a giant server farm essentially. It's still made up of servers. It's still a place where information is stored and relayed out, but for the sake of quantity, power, efficiency the workload in handling that information is dispersed over a huge number of servers in a huge number of locations.

 

[Atmos Duality]

The Cloud is where any sense of "consumers rights" go to die.

In all seriousness: It's distributed processing.
Parts of the game code are not processed on the player's machine directly, but are left up to the server cloud to work on. When the cloud is finished it just sends the results back to the client (the player's machine).

It's sort of like letting your older brother (or sister) do some of your math homework and you only get credit if it's all done.
Of course, the drawback is that now you're partially reliant on your older brother (sister) to do math problems, and you can't finish your homework if they're ever away.

 

[The_Scrivener]

Yeah, I understand the awful risks of having a console involved in this. I was more curious about the actual physical nature of it in the broader sense vs. its application to MS's debacle of a brick of a product.

What confused me is that people talk about it like it is entirely unlike a traditional server so I assumed it was some new space age technology that somehow stored data in air particles or something.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Yeah, I understand the awful risks of having a console involved in this. I was more curious about the actual physical nature of it in the broader sense vs. its application to MS's debacle of a brick of a product.

What confused me is that people talk about it like it is entirely unlike a traditional server so I assumed it was some new space age technology that somehow stored data in air particles or something.

Nah. It's just splitting up the work load between the client's machine and a remote server and sending the results to where ever it needs to go. Nothing magical about that; we've technically been doing it for decades already with mainframes.

 

[thesilentman]

Yeah, I understand the awful risks of having a console involved in this. I was more curious about the actual physical nature of it in the broader sense vs. its application to MS's debacle of a brick of a product.

What confused me is that people talk about it like it is entirely unlike a traditional server so I assumed it was some new space age technology that somehow stored data in air particles or something.

It's not, really. They call it the cloud to make it sound new and fancy, when in reality, it's pretty much an application of networking. One such prominent example of the cloud is the Internet, but when people talk about the Cloud (note capitalization), they mean the ability to access the information from anywhere they are when they're connected to the Internet. That's pretty much it.

Oh, and use the quote function. That way, we can tell who you're addressing when you post. =D

 

[SpAc3man]

Processing, storage and other applications that are done on a distributed computer network. Think of it as a massive group of servers working together on many different tasks. They may or may not be in the same physical location. There will be a lot of redundancy to preserve data in the case of failures.

A company that provides cloud services may own their own servers to provide the service or they may rent server space off another company that rents space in their datacentre. This means that the Cloud isn't one single mass of servers working together and is actually many groups of servers that different people use for their services. There is a lot of overlap however as large companies like Amazon rent out a huge amount of server space to many smaller providers. In fact Amazon's server space system is a distributed mass of servers itself so is actually a cloud in itself. People provide cloud services via a cloud service they use themselves.

 

[LAGG]

Extra points for an easyass metaphor.

In "the cloud" means "In a remote server somewhere."
It's a buzzword.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

What confused me is that people talk about it like it is entirely unlike a traditional server so I assumed it was some new space age technology that somehow stored data in air particles or something.

No, it's basically a word that exists to allow the techno-illiterate to talk as if they know something and for marketing types to exploit this false sense of knowledge.

Remote access? Cloud
Online file storage? Cloud
Distributed processing? Cloud
Virtual Private Network? Cloud
Network Attached Storage? fucking Private Cloud, I shit you not.

I swear, I've even seen home networks refered to as 'your personal Cloud' in marketing crap.

 

[Nick Di Fulvio]

It's a lot of imaginary warehouses that work together that get you stuff.

Simple enough?

 

[Nick Di Fulvio]

gg double post no ability to delete posts

 

[Pigeon_Grenade]

i always assume a Cloud was Gas particles and water taken form in out Atmosphere..

 

[DoPo]

What confused me is that people talk about it like it is entirely unlike a traditional server so I assumed it was some new space age technology that somehow stored data in air particles or something.

Eh...it's not unlike a traditional server but it's a bit enhanced with space age technology. Just a bit. What it offers is scalability and ease of expanding or shrinking on demand. Essentially, it's turning computing into utility - you pay for gas usage, electricity usage, water usage - if you're using the cloud, just add "computing" to that list. You pay for what you use so that allows some flexibility in some situations. Furthermore, cloud technology is predisposed to offer computing as a service in different ways - three broad variations come here
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - the most basic of ways to provide stuff, you're generally given the ability to make virtual machines. And that's your infrastructure. You spin them up when you need them, you spin them down when you don't and you can even have several different "types" of machines which you just make copies of. You pay for whatever the uptime of the machines was.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - a more sophisticated take on the above, developers are just given access to a platform that would meet their demands whatever they are. The platform itself could be a programming language, a framework API, a database and so on. You pay for the usage - the more load on the application, the more you'd pay.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) - the software runs on the Cloud, you just get to use it. Think Gmail and Google Docs, for example. You then pay for usage.

That's the basic overview, obviously not the complete story (you may not actually "pay" for whatever - it could be provided for free, but if you had to pay, it'd be for the specific way you're using it.) but should be enough to give you an idea. The cloud does offer some neat stuff but also it isn't the be all and end all of technology, it's not the beginning of the Singularity and it does get overpraised by marketeers who just think it sounds cool.

I swear, I've even seen home networks refered to as 'your personal Cloud' in marketing crap.

I've seen that, too. I cringed. Also, there is this ad from dear ol' Microsoft


The most I can guess, and I do have to guess, is that they mean SaaS there. I was still quite confused the first time I saw it. And the second time.