Here’s What’s Different About ‘The Cloud’

What’s different about cloud computing versus the forms of computing that have gone before? It’s really just a matter of scale, isn’t it? The Google or Amazon.com or eBay data centers are maybe a little bigger than a big enterprise data center, right? Wrong. One answer lies in an example like Hadoop.

Hadoop is an Apache incubator project that is likely to soon move to full fledged, open source project status. It has all the qualities of good cloud software, as opposed to large scale enterprise software. It’s designed to work on a large server cluster of x86 instruction set machines. Such clusters exist in enterprises everywhere but few scale to the 25,000 at Yahoo that are running instances of Hadoop…

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