What does this have to do with the "cloud?" Does it really mean "Internet?" The cloud is about scalable resources that can be elastically leased for short or long periods of time. That's different than the Internet, which is a means of communication...

The cloud is the part of the network you don't have to care about. It started out meaning the Internet. You would draw a local network diagram, then a little cloud, then the remote network. You didn't care about who owned all the links in between, where they were, how many there were etc. People have been thinking about moving things "into the cloud" well before it became a buzzword. Moving storage into the cloud was easy enough, just make a network request to send or retrieve data. You don't have to care where the data is, or even who owns the servers. This is more than "the internet" because it includes servers and storage, not just the network. Moving computation to the cloud has been trickier - Amazon EC2 gives you a lot of flexibility but it's not very "cloudy". Wolfram Alpha or Google Drive spreadsheets might be a better example.

From The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing [1], there are five essential characteristics of cloud computing:

  * On-demand self service
  * Broad network access
  * Resource pooling
  * Rapid elasticity
  * Measured service

If EC2/AWS doesn't meet that definition, what does?

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145...

I just mean that you have to care a little too much about where the servers are (by region and availability zone) and of course you know who owns them :)

So I take it you haven't talked to a marketing person in the last few years, eh?

I recently was told that a product would be hosted on a local cloud.

What they meant was an NFS share.

The Internet sounds like the 1990s, whereas The Cloud sounds like the 2014s.

Sadly, I'm not just being ironic.

This is great, nice job! I work at Keen IO and we're kind of obsessed with smart device event data. Do you think Spark users would be interested in an API to collect & query all their Spark events? For example we have integrations so that any Stripe or Sendgrid user can collect & query their payment/email events. I could imagine a similar integration for Spark events. We also work with smart devices companies. There could be some really interesting partnership opportunities here. Thanks for sharing your post!

Can everything be enabled without spark.io in the loop? In other words, can I just use my own home server and get the same functionality today?

From the homepage (https://www.spark.io/):

What if I don't want to connect through the Cloud?

That's okay! The Cloud is there to make the Core easier to work with, but if you'd rather do it yourself, that's no problem. The Core lets you do your own socket programming over TCP and UDP.

If you want the simplicity of the Cloud but you want it on your own server, we'll be releasing an open source version of the Cloud designed for quick and easy deployment.

Thanks, so the answer is no, as long as that open source version is vaporware.

The reason I asked is that once they get purchased by, say, Google or Facebook, their cloud services will probably get either shut down, or severely constrained. I'm not interested in sinking resources into a platform based on question marks.

(full disclaimer: I work at Spark, and am personally responsible for the local cloud)

We will definitely be releasing this, we consider it a promise we made to our Kickstarter backers.

How can we help?

Thank you for asking, much appreciated. :)

We'll probably do a small beta as we get the local cloud ready for release to make sure things are easy to use and work as expected. Since it'll be open source, I'm hoping the beta group can help find bugs and even send in pull requests if there are pieces they want added. The beta signup thread is here at the moment: https://community.spark.io/t/where-is-the-source-code-for-th...

Thanks, David

I think you missed this part:

> The Core lets you do your own socket programming over TCP and UDP.

There's nothing stopping you from writing your own TCP/UDP listener server and having the Spark write to a port on that.

Except for the fact that the TCPClient library that they provide is broken and causes the core to lockup within a few minutes.

Supposedly they are going to open source the cloud side of the software so you could setup your own. I would wait for this instead of writing my own tcp connection.

I'm looking for a wifi ingress monitor (ideally it would take a picture rather than be a simple sensor) - any suggestions.

Also, re the spark:

"No need to ever plug the Core into your computer" vs. "Power it over USB"

Edit: scratch that, https://www.spark.io/# has details of a "battery shield" with a LiPo - an idea of the battery life when running the OP's sensor application would be nice though?

are you talking about "ingress" the google game? You are probably talking about physical security but if not, I would love to hear more about what this monitor would do for you to monitor the game

Sorry, I meant the boring one. Presumably in the Google one the app provides all the monitoring you need.

For me, the most interesting thing was HTML server-sent events which I had never heard of before. Thanks!