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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.

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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With

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Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hi there,

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Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chris Pollette. I'm one

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Speaker 1: of the editors here How Stuff Works, and with me

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Speaker 1: is Jonathan Strickland. Hello from the cloud. So we were

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Speaker 1: going to talk about cloud computing today, right we're calling

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Speaker 1: this cloud computing one oh one because the term is

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Speaker 1: reaching saturation in the tech world, and if you're not

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Speaker 1: in the tech world, you might be confused as to

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Speaker 1: what all this talk about cloud computing is is in

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Speaker 1: regards to and and not to mention the other terms

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Speaker 1: that pop up. Sometimes they're used in place of cloud computing,

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Speaker 1: and sometimes they seem to be differentiated from cloud computing.

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Speaker 1: We're gonna try and uh and muddy the one, I mean,

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Speaker 1: clear everything up for you. We're gonna we're gonna give

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Speaker 1: our definitive explanation of cloud computing. Well, to start with,

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Speaker 1: I think what maybe what we should do is just

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Speaker 1: give you a the most basic overview of the entire thing,

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Speaker 1: which is basically what we're talking about doing is not

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Speaker 1: having everything you do be run on the computer on

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Speaker 1: your desktop, you're actually allowing somebody else to uh maybe

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Speaker 1: store information or host applications. It sort of depends on

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Speaker 1: on a lot of different things. You know, how you're

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Speaker 1: going to be using it and what you're going to

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Speaker 1: be doing. But that's essentially it that you're actually sharing

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Speaker 1: some part of the computing process with a network of

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Speaker 1: other computers. That's correct, and and most of us are

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Speaker 1: doing this in some form already, or many of us

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Speaker 1: are anyway. If you have any sort of email web

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Speaker 1: based email application such as a hotmail or Yahoo mail

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Speaker 1: or Gmail, any of those, that's sort of a that's

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Speaker 1: a kind of cloud computing. You are accessing your email,

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Speaker 1: sending email, storing email all on someone else as computers.

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Speaker 1: You're you're accessing it through your browser, but the actual

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Speaker 1: information and applications live on computers that belong to someone

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Speaker 1: else there in the cloud. So that's what that means.

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Speaker 1: If you ever hear the information is stored in the

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Speaker 1: cloud somewhere, that means it's living on servers that belong

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Speaker 1: to a certain company or certain certain organization, uh that

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Speaker 1: provide these services. So that's like cloud storage. Then cloud

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Speaker 1: storage would be if you were to save it on

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Speaker 1: someone else's servers. Okay, well, so then if you are

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Speaker 1: using a web based word processor program like Google Docs

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Speaker 1: or UM like Adobe's um buzzword, then that's actually cloud computing.

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Speaker 1: Then yes, because you're using an application, you're doing everything

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Speaker 1: on the web, but the the network, the cloud is

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Speaker 1: handling the actual computing power. That's right. The only thing

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Speaker 1: that your computer is really handling is to keep your

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Speaker 1: browser going and whatever other applications you happen to have

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Speaker 1: on in the background. But the horsepower is being provided

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Speaker 1: by this this cloud. Now, there are some other terms

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Speaker 1: that do pop up when you're talking about cloud computing

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Speaker 1: that sometimes are confusing. Uh. Those include grid computing and

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Speaker 1: utility computing. Now, grid computing often is used interchangeably, but

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Speaker 1: sometimes it's meant more as a way of adding processing

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Speaker 1: power to an application. So we're talking here about let's

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Speaker 1: say you have a really, really big computing job that's

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Speaker 1: going to take one computer thousands of hours to complete.

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Speaker 1: Grid computing would use a grid of computers and break

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Speaker 1: that job up into parts, and each computer would work

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Speaker 1: on a part, and when it completed, it would send

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Speaker 1: that part back to some administrative computer and then eventually

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Speaker 1: you could reassemble all these pieces to make the whole.

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Speaker 1: That's grid computing, So that could be like a setting

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Speaker 1: at home or folding at home. Basically, these are shared

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Speaker 1: computing projects where people who are doing research can send

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Speaker 1: out chunks of information. They have so much that they

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Speaker 1: can't do it themselves, so they send it to uh

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Speaker 1: out to individuals like you or me, and they use

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Speaker 1: their home computers to share in the computing power and

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Speaker 1: send back the chunk of data once it's been processed, right,

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Speaker 1: and and then utility computing is more about charging people

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Speaker 1: to use this kind of uh, these kind of resources,

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Speaker 1: whether it's processing power or storage. UH. You're you're putting

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Speaker 1: in a metered rate for people to log in and

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Speaker 1: take advantage of these resources. Sometimes we refer to that

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Speaker 1: also as a software as a service. That's more about

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Speaker 1: let's say that you have a word processing application on

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Speaker 1: the web that's really really good. UH, you might want

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Speaker 1: to charge people to use that. That would be using

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Speaker 1: that software as a service. You're providing a service for people,

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Speaker 1: but they don't actually get that software. They can access

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Speaker 1: it over the interne at, but they don't get a

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Speaker 1: copy of it on their own. Computer. So that's what

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Speaker 1: utility computing is. So basically what we're talking about then

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Speaker 1: is not having to lug your computer home every day,

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Speaker 1: because you should be able to access the same information,

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Speaker 1: the same programs, anywhere, any time, from any computer that

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Speaker 1: has access to the Internet. That's correct. Yes, it's supposed

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Speaker 1: to really free us up. It's also kind of going

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Speaker 1: back to the old model of the supercomputer. Well that's uh,

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Speaker 1: it's kind of funny how things end up full circle,

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Speaker 1: I guess sometimes. All right, Well, you can read more

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Speaker 1: about this. We have a whole suite of articles how

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Speaker 1: cloud computing works, how grid computing works, how shared computing works,

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Speaker 1: and their links to many many others online right now

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Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com for more on this

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Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an

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Speaker 1: email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought

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Speaker 1: to you by the rein Into two thousand and twelve camera.

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