From the readings and in your experience, what ethical concerns (if any) do you have with Cloud Computing? What exactly is Cloud Computing? Considering the Internet meme that “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer”:
As developer, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the Cloud? Describe any experiences you’ve had in using the Cloud as a development platform, what led you to use it, and if you plan on using it in the future.
As a consumer, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the Cloud? Describe what sort of Cloud services you use on a regular basis. What trade-off are you making in utilizing these platforms?
Not going to lie, I’d never really considered the ethical implications of cloud computing before these readings. Honestly I’d only ever considered it a technological benefit, like faster CPUs and longer-lasting batteries. I hadn’t considered the security repercussions or the economic effect it would have. Ultimately, there are far more benefits to cloud computing than traditional computational models, but it’s important to stay mindful of the drawbacks to supersizing data storage and manipulation – thousands of miles away from your desk too!
So what is cloud computing? If you want a comical, though technologically questionable, answer, look no further than Google’s vision of the cloud (that one gave me a good laugh). In all seriousness, though, it might be more helpful to look at the New York Times take on cloud computing, which they essentially boil down to
… an airy term for real systems of cleverly networked computers
They aren’t wrong, though I think Amazon Web Services might prefer a more dignified definition. Basically the cloud is a bunch of networked computers that work together to complete tasks. It’s not that unlike the internet, except when you send a job to “the cloud,” all you know is that “the cloud,” completes the job. Your process, data, query, whatever, could be split up onto multiple computers, copied redundantly, or just sent to some idle machine to compute. Regardless, the process is abstracted away from you, the user. The cloud offers both a way to outsource heavy computation and a venue to house enormous amounts of data (and then do something with that data). As far as the meme goes, sure the cloud isn’t really that ambiguous, but it’s certainly more than just another person’s computer (it’s a whole bunch of ’em!)
The advantages of the cloud are numerous, and we find more and more benefits as time goes along. The biggest advantage as a developer the cloud offers is a platform already in place that’s staged to spin up some new idea. I don’t have to worry about creating some complicated infrastructure to test some computationally heavy idea I have – I can just order some resources for an EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services and boom, I’ll just worry about the code. I like to compare it to a software developer not having to worry about developing a processor. The developer just gets to think about the software and assume it’ll run on the platform provided. Also, outsourcing computation to some giant like Amazon is extremely scalable. When my idea takes off and lots of users are visiting my web service, all I need to do is purchase some more EC2 instances or increase the resources on each one. What that physically means could be quite different, but the simulated result is that my hardware magically upgraded to 10x the capacity and I can now service 10x the users. I had to use Amazon Web Services for my Web-based Computing class, and it was a breeze to set up (8 out of 10, would use again).
Additionally, the cloud offers access to data anywhere I have access to the internet, and according to this cutting edge infographic from Verizon, that’s just about everywhere. As a consumer, it’s great being able to push a file up to Google Drive and know that I can access it on-demand some other time, provided an internet connection.
Unfortunately, the more I use cloud services, the more reliance I’m putting on 3rd parties to keep my information safe and to execute my jobs well. I have close to one-hundred gigabytes of information in Google Drive across a couple of accounts. That’s a great amount of trust I have in Google, especially because a great portion of that data isn’t replicated on a local hard disk. If it’s lost in the Drive, it’s lost for good.
What’s more scary, though, than losing that information is infiltration. If someone gains access to my files without my knowing, I could be in a world of hurt. Sure, I exercise discretion and keep critical financial information out of the cloud, but I know that not everyone does. Heck, faculty here at Notre Dame have tried to keep sensitive information in AFS space before, and OIT has to delete that information for their own good!
So the trade-off between the availability and convenience of data everywhere/easy, scalable, outsourced computation and security lies in encryption. Just ask Nicole Perlroth why security needs to increase. It’s taxing on performance and generally a pain to perform, but there are many nasty people out there that would love to feast on the exabytes of information in the cloud. But sacrificing some performance for security is a much better trade-off in my mind than sacrificing data availability and keeping all my information on some external hard drive locked away in a safe.
Maybe I’m too trusting of the giants in computing, but I think they pay some engineers a lot of money to make sure what I’ve entrusted to them is safe, and that’s enough for me to sleep at night.
Jesse's Ethics Blog 
