Head in the Clouds

 

In case you're wondering what I'm up to, I'm reading everything I can find about clouds and interviewing lots of companies (vendors and a few users) about their cloud offerings and their plans.

The hype level is beyond amazing.  I know that there is a point in any successful technology where it is used to label everything, because it's so good at attracting positive attention, but I think we're close to reaching the saturation level here.  I hope so.  If everything is a cloud, then it gets very hard to see anything!

The confusion level is high.  Everyone who is looking at clouds as a buyer, a seller, or a commentator (press, analyst, consultant...you name it) has their own definitions.  I have a rule here.  If you want to communicate with somone about clouds on a serious level, exchange definitions first.  Otherwise, you may just be talking past each other.

In my research (I feel like a graduate student on a quest) I have found a lot of great stuff and some real trash.  I'd like to point you to some interesting stuff while I continue my research project.  I'm nearing the end of this phase and I'm going to tell you what I think soon, but I can't resist passing on a few goodies:

There is no agreement on what a private cloud is.  It might be a new architecture for a data center, it might be a new way of architecting part of a large enterprise's data center when certain workloads are present, and it might be  privately owned public cloud.  I'll talk about all of those in my second cloud computing article (the first is on IBM's cloud computing portfolio), but in the meantime, you might enjoy an interesting glimpse into one problem in determining whether an enterprise should consider a private cloud:  what kind of workloads that private cloud would process.  Try this article from Kenneth Oestreich at The Fountainhead on questions nobody's asking re cloud applications.

Or you could read this article from Treb Ryan at OpSource (he's definitely an interested party since he sells platforms to ISVs that could be considered public clouds) about why a private cloud isn't really a cloud.   I can see where he's coming from, but I just spent an hour on the phone with a CIO who's building his own cloud (from a thousand servers and a lot of open source software) and he can make a very polished argument for why he's got the benefits of a cloud.  I think the jury's out on this one and a lot depends on (as Ken Oestreich suspects) what you're going to run on that cloud.

So back to the books -- actually to another hundred Internet posts.  I'll have more than hints for you by next week.  

Comments

[Kevin]

As cloud computing is still considered a relatively new technology and it has churned successful models such as software as a service (SaaS), I believe that it is still evolving before it can be defined correctly. However I have found this link to be really helpful:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031

[Kai]

Amy, your article is realy nice! Here in Germany the SaaS Market is realy growing fast, at the moment. If you are interested in the network please visit http://www.saasportal.de - kind greets - Kai.

[Russ Castronovo]

This effort is very good as well.

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html

Russ

[Ravi Kulkarni]

There are few attempts at definining what Cloud Computing is. One such is this article: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-287001.html

Also see: http://www.opencloudmanifesto.org/opencloudmanifesto1.htm

Regards,

Ravi
My blog at http://computingnebula.wordpress.com

[Russ Castronovo]

Amy,

While you're looking around it might be interesting to find out why no one has settled on a definition of cloud computing. I've never seen any topic cause such debate as cloud computing.

Russ