View from above the Cloud
The Riverside Theatre at the Perth Convention Centre held audience to a contentious and informative session when it held "The Cloud Discussion" at the recent WALIS ISDE7 convention.
This discussion created a small twitter storm as Sonny's presentation on "The NBN GIS and the Cloud" brought considerations to bear on the bed of roses. Not one to shrug off the benefits of the delivery of SAS environments Sonny simply pointed out that bandwidth can be easily achieved with a "Stationwagon full of DVD's".
"The bandwidth is great, the problem is the latency" said Sonny.
Deployment of GIS Solutions through the cloud will have to be considered in the context of application design and the acceptable limits of latency. In an environment that yields its benefit through a rich level of interaction with large data sets these are questions that are not intractable "but the solutions cannot be considered in isolation from the end user and the application".
Suggestions that a distributed architecture will serve to best resolve the load issues of GIS solutions in "The Cloud" are poignantly obvious when (as Sonny suggests) an iPhone in World War II applied to Enigma would have "won the war".
Well we did win the war, but the latency in the computing took an awful toll.
