OK, search is NOT everything, but in terms of searching for information...
Check out Google Trend's view on:
Moodle -vs- Cloud Computing -vs- Big Data
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=moodle%2C%20cloud%20computing%2C%20big%20data&cmpt=q
Moodle massively outranks both cloud computing and big data combined
Of course... Moodle is a thing (software you can download). 'Cloud computing' and 'big data' are figments of a marketing person's imagination. I would rather compare with something that exists
Having said that, I find that surprising. Nobody seems to be able to shut up for two minutes about 'cloud computing' (whatever that is) at the moment...
Depends on your interpretation really:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
I think your issue lies a couple of lines down:
"In common usage, the term "the cloud" is essentially a metaphor for the Internet."
and the fact clustered hosting is sold as "cloud"...
On a sort of related note, thought this was pretty cool:
Love the Lego computer. It reminds me of a story told by a guy I worked with many years ago. In his prior job he worked for a company that was working on a pneumatic computer for the military - really. The idea, according to him, was that a pneumatic computer would not be affected by electromagnetic interference. I bet it computed about as fast as the Lego computer.
We get this a lot on here though don't we - "I'm going to host Moodle in the cloud". Means, of course, precisely nothing. But it sounds a hell of a lot cooler than "we don't have the resources to host Moodle ourselves".
Perhaps I am too cynical. However, for almost every client conversation I have that involves 'The Cloud' somewhere, the followup question is "Hmmm... so what is it exactly you are proposing to do?"
Howard, it might just rain!
Dawn
Dawn,
I live in Scotland. At any given time it is reasonable to assume it's raining
Well it could mean you have it running on large distributed infrastructure that auto provisions additional resources as they are required and scale back down again when they are not...
For the most part it seems to mean rack n stack cheap vm's.
As for "dont have the resources to host Moodle ourselves" what exactly does "host ourselves" mean?
I would wager most Moodle partners dont own their own servers, they are almost certainly leased, perhaps some co-locate.
I believe BlackBoard Moodlerooms were hosting on Dells Cloud infrastructure, not sure if they are on BB's own hardware now. Others describe hosting in nuclear bunkers protected by drones, claymore's and attack dogs, clearly not their own DC which means they are not physically hosting the server even if they own it so really, whats the difference?
Goodness no... our servers are "in the cloud".
Actually, I think you'll find they are in a room with a lot of racks and air condition in the Netherlands someplace
My point is that clients just say this without (clearly) having any idea what they mean. Not all but most. "We have to have some of that cloud stuff".
Almost nobody runs their own servers - who would want to?
Moodle.org appears to be hosted by CloudFlare (a US company) with the country listed as the EU and the flag (in FlagFox) plonked in Switzerland, which isn't in the EU.
I guess that makes the cloud quite "fuzzy."
I've had good results with Digital Ocean, although I'm not sure the 100% SSD is providing all of the benefits that it should. Running 4 or 5 development/staging servers off one 2gb instance seems to be fine, so long as they aren't approaching production volumes.
But my delight was in finding Moodle outperforming such ubiquitous if somewhat hyped terms as cloud computing and big data!
Brian, hi
do forgive me if I am repeating your point here, can be two days behind
given that open source (Moodle) is the only unadulterated one out of the three....then surely in consistently leading the way, this is a good thing.
cheers,
Dawn
Sorry to come late to the party...
Moodle is only just ahead of Blackboard:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=moodle%2C%20blackboard%2C%20sakai&cmpt=q
On the other hand, the top ten opensourse alternatives to moodle listed on this page barely register.
Surprisingly Moodle beats Wordpress. But Tumblr leaves them both chocking in it's dust.
I have a full portable installation with database and webserver on my pendrive that comes in at about 350mb :p