Cloud Clients

The term cloud has many definitions in a computing context these days. Some refer to the various social networks as a cloud which I think is overly broad. Perhaps the best definition is the simplest; "a group of interconnected nodes". A "cloud" of nodes is a design construct, not a deployment one. The number of nodes and their respective locations should have no impact on the terminology used.

So what are the roles of these nodes that make up clouds? Typically, a node plays the role of a server. They act when they are requested to act. Users of these clouds are actually outside the cloud. The servers within the cloud then act on behalf of these client requests.

So is it possible to have these outside clients join into the cloud in order to share some of these computational resources? It certainly is and that is what peer-to-peer computing is all about. In this distributed computing model, the client is them most prevalent role in the entire system. Forget about the managers that allow these clients to discover one another. The manager are necessary but the clients taking on more than just a simple dummy role is what is interesting. It allows scale within the cloud to spread like disease.