May 27, 2008
| The Accelerator and the Grid >>
Miasma Computing
Aghh I’ve been reading some awesome stuff lately but no time to blog it all up. Check this out — Nick Carr on miasma (not cloud) computing and the funny way we think about the internet:
The metaphor of “the cloud” seems to have been derived from those schematic drawings of corporate computing systems that use stylized images of clouds to represent the Internet - that vast, ill-defined digital mass that lies beyond the firewall. Those drawings always reminded me of the ancient maps of the known world, the edges of which were marked with the legend “Beyond Here There Be Dragons.”
Over the weekend I finally switched my site over to Slicehost and I have to say, I enjoyed being forced to understand how it all really works. Turns out the web is really just a bunch of stressed-out, poorly-configured applications waiting for you to send them special messages indicating you want them to get something off a disk for you! And words like “prefork” are involved.