On 3/7/2012 1:20 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
On 03/07/12 10:06 AM, John Hinton wrote:
I'm looking into adding a cloud to one of my servers.
what does "a cloud" mean in this context ?
to me, a cloud is a set of homogenous servers running distributed applications. classic cloud is google. the term has been degraded to also refer to a stack of servers running a virtualization platform such that the individual VMs don't care what hardware they are assigned to, classic example of a VM cloud is Amazon AWS.
I don't understand how ANYTHING you do on a single server could be called 'cloudy'.
Perhaps the definition of cloud has gone lower and should be called "fog" now?
It seems however that the definition is an online infrastructure which may: provide applications provide file storage calendar contacts collaboration communication among a number of other things
and that these services are all available to 'users' on the cloud via: servers desktops laptops tablets phones
As for how many servers? Well that is a matter of how many users you have, loads, storage capacity and just about anything else a single or bank of servers might do.
At the moment, our business has 4 people in four different locations and we want to better share our work. Seems like file shares are one aspect, but perhaps some applications, certainly collaboration and I really don't like putting stuff on Google. I see at least one of these allows you to run OpenOffice through the browser. I haven't really done a lot of research into this yet and really all I wanted was some ideas for a simple open source cloud software that was preferably friendly to CentOS.
Also, this would be a good exercise in learning a bit more of what is out there that our clients might wish to use. No, I'm not building a system where anyone in the world can sign up, nor for a fortune 500 company, nor even one much smaller. Just for us at the moment, and perhaps do a bit of sharing to our clients from time to time.
I have so far found eyeOS and am also looking at ownCloud. Thanks Devin for that link.