Running big Open Source applications in the cloud?

[Rob]

On 2013-06-11 04:40, Gustin Johnson wrote:
> The "cloud" is a really vague term.  You could lease a VPS, install X and
> NX, remote in and voila, you are running GIMP in the "cloud".  Heck, you
> could lease a Windows VPS, RDP in and then run GIMP.  These are bona fide
> "cloud" solutions.

More often, though, "cloud computing" is just a marketing term for web
services, whether they're back end only or entirely web-based like Google
Docs. I had a Yahoo web mail account in about 1999 and never knew where the
server(s) lived. That decoupling of software from any particular hardware
is what the "cloud computing" proponents put forth as the biggest
advantage. Around the same time, I was working on a web app to edit, mix
and render audio, using sox, eca, etc., to allow people on different
continents to upload tracks and collaborate on a song (the UI sucked
because DHTML didn't exist yet and I wasn't going to use Flash, so I
abandoned it). If someone introduced something like that today, they'd call
it "cloud-based" but what they'd mean is web-based.

It sounded to me like he was talking about something like Amazon EC2,
though, meant for back end number crunching more than the UI.

Rob