Cloud computing - IAAS.

Cloud computing what is it. It is a service of various types. Traditionally you have accessed a web server for your needs. There are actually many ways you can use "The Cloud" as a service (AAS). One that is becoming more prevalent is Infrastructure as a service (IAAS). Wikipedia defines it as:

"In the most basic cloud-service model, providers of IaaS offer computers - physical or (more often) virtual machines - and other resources. (A hypervisor, such as Xen or KVM, runs the virtual machines as guests.) Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as images in a virtual-machine image-library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks).
To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed."

What a mouthful. That means anything you use on the computer comes from a other system(s) on the internet.  You do not have to put an operating system on your computer. You do not have to have a way of storing data locally. You have what is traditionally known as a dumb terminal. Does not mean you are dumb, but your computer system is controlled remotely. There has been a drive in this direction for a long time with the use of the thin client. Thin client is a low resource machine that uses servers on the network to do the heavy lifting so to speak.

Where I use to work, they used thin clients in the public access labs. Hopefully it would reduce support. The units they used were small desktops and you had to support them just like a regular desktop. You always were seeming to have to update the software on the units. Fortunately, I was not involved directly with all that. A better situation would have been to have a thin client without a tradtional operating system on the unit, but do have software that could be completely be loaded from the network. I made the suggestion to do that, but the ideas fell on deaf ears.

With IAAS, Sneaker support (having a technician to go out and correct problems) is reduced, All software issues can be remedied remotely from one central point. You also have the advantage that data is no longer stored on the local system. So someone could take the unit and and then not be able to exact sensitive information from the unit. All data is held in a central point, so making backups (duplicates of business data) easier to do. Only scraping the surface of what all can be done. Here is a url for a short very unprofessional video about what could happen when you bootup a system that has been set up for IAAS.

Ltsp boot example.

Actually do know what is going on and was just kidding of course. It has been a while, but I have talked about LTSP (Linux termial server project) before in an earlier article. Sort of an in house type of IAAS that companies can implement on their own.

More information at:
www.ltsp.org
http://www.instructables.com/id/Another-almost-free-computers-thin-client-set-up/

Alternative:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Using-Thin-Clients-a-quick-way-with-Debian-linux/

Update:
Did the same thing with an old Pentium 1 233 mhz and just 128 meg of ram. Remember the server will do all the heavy lifting.  Of course you will want to have the computer in a case!!  The P! did not support 1g nic card, which would have made the system really useful.

Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D57e6_h8UXw