Cloud must be going though the most rapid hype cycle in history; I now am firmly in the trough of despondency! Every hosting company is claiming to do Cloud; every supplier who supplies a hosting company claims every product that they sell to them is Cloud!
Okay, I am firmly in the camp that commodity-based IT infrastructure is generally a good thing. This infrastructure should be easy to provision, easy to scale, easy to support and have a financial model which means that in general, one pays for consumption as opposed to potential consumption.
From the end-user point of view, IT infrastructure should be invisible and as magical as electricity, the infernal combustion engine, powered flight and all other technologies which are used on a day-to-day basis and the average tabloid reader neither knows or cares how they work.
There are many technologies both old and new which enable this process; none of these technologies are in and of themselves Cloud Technologies.
The rise of the x86 Hypervisor as exemplified by VMWare is an extremely important enabling technology; especially if you wish to segregate workloads, either for technical reasons or to enable multi-tenancy type environments. But an environment utilsing a hypervisor is not necessarily a Cloud and a non-hypervisored environment is not disqualified as a being Cloud.
Actually, I think the constant focus on the Cloud may actually be harmful; we need to be focussed on what the customer wants; if we spend our lives trying to shoe-horn everything into a Cloud-type definition, we could well miss what is important. And if the customer at the end of the day, nods and says 'Hey, you mean, just like a Cloud; you can smile and say 'Exactly!''.
So just because you interface well with the variety of Hypervisors out there; it doesn't mean you have a Cloud product. You are quite possibly doing yourself immense harm and you may find you alienate those people who don't want a Cloud product!
Simon Wardley from Canonical likes to compare Cloud Computing to the Industrial Revolution; Cloud Computing is a movement, a change; it is not a thing.
Stephenson launching 'The Rocket' as 'Industrial Revolution'!?
