I attended the third London Cloud Camp last night at the QE II conference centre. I had a really good time and met some interesting people. One of the conversation topics was around Cloud Computing definitions: you can probably imagine the discussions over what is just the internet and what is the “cloud”. Someone mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk the service which lets one outsource menial jobs via a Web Service API.
The history of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk
This got me thinking, if you look at someone like George Reese’s definition of a Cloud Service Mechanical Turk meets all the criteria. I’d add scalable as another criteria that a service has to meet do be defined as in/on the cloud and Mechanical Turk does this.
Why does this matter? What people seem to miss when trying to define Cloud Computing is that it doesn’t matter how the service is implemented! And that is the whole point of the paradigm. For all we know Amazon EC2 could be run by a team of monkeys typing on keyboards or using abacuses. The beauty of Cloud Services is we don’t need to know how they are implemented, just how we interact with them.
When you’re trying to explain Cloud Computing just remember Amazon Mechanical Turk!
