Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 15, 2012

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EXPLANATION OF THE CLOUD

by Hazed

So what, exactly, is this cloud that we have moved to? It sounds kind of amorphous, like it’s floating around in the sky somewhere with no real physical presence, but that’s not really it.

The term “cloud computing” can be used to describe several different things, but in our case it means a change to the way the infrastructure that makes Fed possible is hosted.

With cloud computing, Fed2 still runs on a physical computer, it’s just not a dedicated server for Fed and Fed alone.

Previously, we had a server in a data center in Manchester. This piece of hardware ran Fed, and our website, and that’s all it did. Since Fed is not a very big piece of software, when the game ran it only used a fraction of the processor power on the machine, and a tiny bit of the available disk space. So we were paying for a lot of stuff we didn’t need.

With cloud computing, we no longer have a box that is just for Fed2. Instead, we rent exactly as much space and processing power as we need, and it’s up to the data center to share out the space on “virtual servers” so that we get what we need, but no more than we need, and to monitor our needs and give us more should our requirements change.

Now we are only paying for what we actually use, which reduces our monthly bills - a great relief to my groaning credit card. (It’s not going to stop me nagging you to buy slithies, though!)

It’s called cloud computing because when network engineers draw diagrams of networks, they use squares to indicate a fixed box containing a computer, with lines to indicate cables connecting the computers, but when they don’t know all of the details of a network outside their domain they represent it with a picture of a cloud.

For another idea of what cloud computing is, here’s a cartoon. (Make sure you move your cursor over the image, because the “tool tip” that comes up is very funny too.)

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