Experience with Cloud Computing and eBook readings reaction

My Experience with Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is not completely new to me, I’ve been using Google Docs and Microsoft Azure services. When collaborating, I often will use Google Docs. Office 2010 also has a cloud feature where multiple users can edit the document simultaneously; a user can see the other user’s edits in real-time. Microsoft Azure is a particularly useful implementation of cloud services because developers can create an application in a way that is almost identical to the traditional methods. With Amazon and Google’s cloud services, developing for their databases is quite a different paradigm from the traditional relational databases. Though Microsoft and Amazon’s services both run in the cloud and share the core features, the actual application frameworks are quite different. Microsoft’s tooling and development paradigms are reused, this has enabled many developers, including myself, to have a shallow learning curve in developing and deploying applications for the cloud. Being somewhat of an insider, I can appreciate the economic benefits of cloud computing. Many companies spend significant amounts of money hosting their applications in-house on their own servers and must employ expensive IT personnel to maintain and manage the infrastructure. When the servers become outdated, there is a significant amount of effort and cost with provisioning and integrating new equipment. These costs are allayed when corporate applications are hosted in the cloud. The company need not be concerned with the physical hardware on which their application are running; these parameters are abstracted away from the client. When the client needs additional capacity, a request is made to the hosting provider and additional resources are almost immediately available. A real-world scenario where these benefits may be pronounced is if a small, relatively unknown company’s product is to be reviewed by CNN. The company is expecting their web traffic to increase 100 fold in the week following the air date. Obviously, the company doesn’t have the server resources to accommodate the expected traffic and provisioning a powerful server farm for a week of high traffic isn’t economically justifiable or practical to accomplish in a short time frame. With cloud computing, the company can pay for what it needs and easily scale their web site’s resources for a period and scale back down for a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house. Several of my projects involved such scenarios.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------



Response to Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social

The article discusses the traditional reading with electronic reading experiences and aspects of deep-linear thinking compared to an electronic experience that has more content but distractions. The article acknowledges that multitasking does have its detriments but contrasts this with what we gain from multitasking.

A significant portion of the article critically discusses Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows. The author, Johnson, is critical of Carr’s, “unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading”. I agree with Johnson in that the days of slow contemplative reading are long gone, for better or worse. In fact, there were criticizers of the printing press that argued that our capacity for memorization will vanish as people can simply refer to printed material. Indeed, memorization was a common skill in cultures lacking print technology; however, the vast benefits of printed material has more than made up for the detriments of a decreased capacity for memorization.
I sometimes feel that Johnson makes an argument that appears to be a false choice; either deep reading or full on multitasking. I believe that a middle ground is a more rational position. Just because multitasking seems to be ubiquitous today, does not preclude a person from engaging in uninterrupted deep reading when prudent. In addition, peoples’ personalities individualities may play a role with how significant the detriments of multitasking truly are. Some people are easily distracted (ADD/ADHD) and are more negatively affected by the constant electronic stimulus of the screen. Marketers have fully taken advantage of the internet/web medium as a revenue stream. In mainstream, non-paid web content, people can easily become overwhelmed with advertisements. Advertisers have a goal to distract you from your current task harvest your ‘click’. Doing research or completing tasks in such an environment can be difficult. I think that uninterrupted, deep-reading is still achievable even with all the distractions technology affords.