I’m on vacation today. Yes, it’s awesome. I even got to play Beer Santa!
After dropping off some holiday cheer, I scrolled through my Twitter stream and I came across a tweet from Kevin Kelling aka @BlueShiftBlog regarding a cloud article. Interestingly, the article was from… Wired. Yes. Wired. Yes. That Wired.
Over the River and Through the Woods to Cloud Computing We Go
In the Wired article by @jonst0kes (with a 0) there are references to Moore’s Law, workloads, bursty things, and that demmed elusive Pimpernel… the public cloud. You should check it out too.
We’re going to be seeing cloud taken apart in a lot more consumer web blogs and non-traditional IT coverage blogs now. What is yet to be determined in all things cloud is the level of dismantling and elemental economic review associated with the latest consumer device being dissected with a running tally of part costs via kit alone.
SPOILER: It’s not always about just the kit.
Having read through this article a few times (it has paragraphs and stuff) I have determined I need to write a blog post. Yes. Friday Fudge style.
The Dude
Something has been bothering me about cloud computing for two years now
Me too man. It’s like a new shirt that you forgot to wash and it is really scratchy. Annoying, am I right? It’s also like when people try to compare the credit card pay as you go bring your own chaos monkey (BYOCM) service to one where you enter into a workload tuned SLA backed contract with performance penalty clauses.
The Villain
Cloud services don’t drop drastically in price the way that transistors do
If only we can keep people thinking the cloud is synonymous with INCREASINGLY FREE BEER! Then our trap will have been successful! Yes, please assume that everyone and everything fits into the generic public cloud! Let’s be sure to make it seem that statements made on a stage regarding software applications younger than 1 year old adequately represent what 99.9% of all companies on the planet do today across all their lines of business ARE COMPLETELY LOGICAL AND WITHOUT FLAW. It is perfectly reasonable to just speak in absolutes and subscribe to hyperbole!
The Biker
The problem arises when the overlap between what the public cloud supplies and what a customer needs is fairly narrow.
Look man… this cloud stuff is going to be about a lot of things over the next 3-4 years but what it won’t be about is a specific reference to any single infrastructure company or player. We’re in the early days. Just like this consumer web thing that spawned 10429 ways to share photos and post it to Twitter, Facebook, and a zillion other places — saying we don’t need another photo sharing app doesn’t mean we need don’t need another cloud company. We just need to know which ride is our ride right now and which ride is our ride tomorrow… and how much it would cost to add some bichin’spider lights.
The Barber
The downside to the “outsourced heavy lifting” aspect of cloud comes when you don’t have a whole lot of heavy lifting to do, at which point you’re subsidizing someone else’s heavy lifting.
The weather is a funny thing you know? Just looking back a year ago it seemed like nobody was going to contain what cloud was and wasn’t. Now, it seems we are all bent on sticking cloud into a box. Hah! No pun intended! I tell ya… one thing is for sure — there is going to be clouds. Big. Small. Tall. Short. Fat. Skinny. Decaf. All of it is good. All of it is disruptive. It’s not so much about the horse race but where the primary race venues are to be found: locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally… and the entry fees.
The Bland
companies are much more excited by private and hybrid cloud models than they are about the public cloud
Pundits will continue to isolate and refine specific definitions and attempt to draw on historical trends as a basis for extrapolation — often in a contrived zero sum game. This is not new. What is new is the creative destruction of what has previously been an accepted method of satisfying workload requirements — dedicated one off silos of physical infrastructure. So while the notion of a service provider might sound quaint or Orwellian depending on your point of view, the end goal of the enterprise team both large and small is to do more with less and increase satisfaction to the end user. That means moving towards internal service provider models and making things happen in ways end users often think of as being available only externally. In fact, it can be both and we’re on a road that takes us there.
