Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hi there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Chris Pollette. I'm one
Speaker 1: of the editors here How Stuff Works, and with me
Speaker 1: is Jonathan Strickland. Hello from the cloud. So we were
Speaker 1: going to talk about cloud computing today, right we're calling
Speaker 1: this cloud computing one oh one because the term is
Speaker 1: reaching saturation in the tech world, and if you're not
Speaker 1: in the tech world, you might be confused as to
Speaker 1: what all this talk about cloud computing is is in
Speaker 1: regards to and and not to mention the other terms
Speaker 1: that pop up. Sometimes they're used in place of cloud computing,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they seem to be differentiated from cloud computing.
Speaker 1: We're gonna try and uh and muddy the one, I mean,
Speaker 1: clear everything up for you. We're gonna we're gonna give
Speaker 1: our definitive explanation of cloud computing. Well, to start with,
Speaker 1: I think what maybe what we should do is just
Speaker 1: give you a the most basic overview of the entire thing,
Speaker 1: which is basically what we're talking about doing is not
Speaker 1: having everything you do be run on the computer on
Speaker 1: your desktop, you're actually allowing somebody else to uh maybe
Speaker 1: store information or host applications. It sort of depends on
Speaker 1: on a lot of different things. You know, how you're
Speaker 1: going to be using it and what you're going to
Speaker 1: be doing. But that's essentially it that you're actually sharing
Speaker 1: some part of the computing process with a network of
Speaker 1: other computers. That's correct, and and most of us are
Speaker 1: doing this in some form already, or many of us
Speaker 1: are anyway. If you have any sort of email web
Speaker 1: based email application such as a hotmail or Yahoo mail
Speaker 1: or Gmail, any of those, that's sort of a that's
Speaker 1: a kind of cloud computing. You are accessing your email,
Speaker 1: sending email, storing email all on someone else as computers.
Speaker 1: You're you're accessing it through your browser, but the actual
Speaker 1: information and applications live on computers that belong to someone
Speaker 1: else there in the cloud. So that's what that means.
Speaker 1: If you ever hear the information is stored in the
Speaker 1: cloud somewhere, that means it's living on servers that belong
Speaker 1: to a certain company or certain certain organization, uh that
Speaker 1: provide these services. So that's like cloud storage. Then cloud
Speaker 1: storage would be if you were to save it on
Speaker 1: someone else's servers. Okay, well, so then if you are
Speaker 1: using a web based word processor program like Google Docs
Speaker 1: or UM like Adobe's um buzzword, then that's actually cloud computing.
Speaker 1: Then yes, because you're using an application, you're doing everything
Speaker 1: on the web, but the the network, the cloud is
Speaker 1: handling the actual computing power. That's right. The only thing
Speaker 1: that your computer is really handling is to keep your
Speaker 1: browser going and whatever other applications you happen to have
Speaker 1: on in the background. But the horsepower is being provided
Speaker 1: by this this cloud. Now, there are some other terms
Speaker 1: that do pop up when you're talking about cloud computing
Speaker 1: that sometimes are confusing. Uh. Those include grid computing and
Speaker 1: utility computing. Now, grid computing often is used interchangeably, but
Speaker 1: sometimes it's meant more as a way of adding processing
Speaker 1: power to an application. So we're talking here about let's
Speaker 1: say you have a really, really big computing job that's
Speaker 1: going to take one computer thousands of hours to complete.
Speaker 1: Grid computing would use a grid of computers and break
Speaker 1: that job up into parts, and each computer would work
Speaker 1: on a part, and when it completed, it would send
Speaker 1: that part back to some administrative computer and then eventually
Speaker 1: you could reassemble all these pieces to make the whole.
Speaker 1: That's grid computing, So that could be like a setting
Speaker 1: at home or folding at home. Basically, these are shared
Speaker 1: computing projects where people who are doing research can send
Speaker 1: out chunks of information. They have so much that they
Speaker 1: can't do it themselves, so they send it to uh
Speaker 1: out to individuals like you or me, and they use
Speaker 1: their home computers to share in the computing power and
Speaker 1: send back the chunk of data once it's been processed, right,
Speaker 1: and and then utility computing is more about charging people
Speaker 1: to use this kind of uh, these kind of resources,
Speaker 1: whether it's processing power or storage. UH. You're you're putting
Speaker 1: in a metered rate for people to log in and
Speaker 1: take advantage of these resources. Sometimes we refer to that
Speaker 1: also as a software as a service. That's more about
Speaker 1: let's say that you have a word processing application on
Speaker 1: the web that's really really good. UH, you might want
Speaker 1: to charge people to use that. That would be using
Speaker 1: that software as a service. You're providing a service for people,
Speaker 1: but they don't actually get that software. They can access
Speaker 1: it over the interne at, but they don't get a
Speaker 1: copy of it on their own. Computer. So that's what
Speaker 1: utility computing is. So basically what we're talking about then
Speaker 1: is not having to lug your computer home every day,
Speaker 1: because you should be able to access the same information,
Speaker 1: the same programs, anywhere, any time, from any computer that
Speaker 1: has access to the Internet. That's correct. Yes, it's supposed
Speaker 1: to really free us up. It's also kind of going
Speaker 1: back to the old model of the supercomputer. Well that's uh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny how things end up full circle,
Speaker 1: I guess sometimes. All right, Well, you can read more
Speaker 1: about this. We have a whole suite of articles how
Speaker 1: cloud computing works, how grid computing works, how shared computing works,
Speaker 1: and their links to many many others online right now
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an
Speaker 1: email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought
Speaker 1: to you by the rein Into two thousand and twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready, are you