Is our vision clouded or is it cloud? It appears at present that there is very little agreement on what clouds are, what advantages they bring and how to use them. Even individual cloud suppliers seem to have non consistent definitions. Take Amazon for example, one of the pioneers in this field, you can have
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Amazon Compute Cloud
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Amazon Simple DB
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Amazon Simple Storage Service
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Amazon Cloudfront
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Amazon Simple Queue Service
It is the first service which really stands out in this crowd; this appears to be an attempt to redefine flexible hosting as a cloud service. The ability to build a virtual machine, configure it and then host it in Amazon's 'cloud'. I am currently struggling in seeing how this is a cloud as opposed to a dynamic deployment model or perhaps the cloud is simply a dynamic deployment model for virtualised infrastructure?
We are still going to need people to manage this virtualised infrastructure; people who are going to configure the AMIs, people who are going to secure the AMIs, people who are going to carry out capacity planning etc. And I'm not sure we are going to see any less of them.
So I am wondering, what is this cloud that we are all talking about? Is it going to be like virtualisation, a band-wagon that everyone jumps on? Is it going to be a new way of developing applications? Is it going to be simply Dynamic Infrastructure which is simply an evolution of the current virtualisation initiatives.
It's not really very clear, so perhaps Cloud is a very appropriate term. IT Archtitects love clouds, it's a fuzzy thing where magic happens; not sure what the magic is but it's magic!
Don’t take away my fuzzy clouds! I’ll never be able to do another architectural diagram without them!
Seriously though, I think we’re only beginning to see the battles over defining the cloud. Witness the controversy over the Cloud Manifesto published last week.
Everyone is angling for position in the cloud space (maybe we should call it the sky?) I too am scratching my head – what’s the difference between, say, slicehost and Amacon EC2?
Good point mr storagebod….
Why does having your own virtualised datacentre as apposed to someone else hosting your virtual requirements mean its cloud?
Still the old hosting model with lipstick and jumping on the easy virtualisation bandwagon in my view at the moment…
Cloud for me is all the usual stuff plus :-
1) Deployment & data dynamic geographic mobility – move your app & data automatically to a cloud location nearest the consumer, or to the cheapest location that hour
2) Real-time dynamic control of IaaS/PaaS resources and the associated bill
3) Separation from state / data and compute / application
But overall for me it’s moving the cost relationship from facilities & tech to ‘usefullness’ (eg compute & state.
Cloud certainly will use many underpinning technologies – dynamic deployment, hypervisors, slices etc – and the marketing hype & FUD certainly isn’t helping clarify things…
I think there’s another blog entry brewing. But there is potential in the cloud to turn IT into a service, as long as we can stop our users worrying about how the service is generated. They just need to worry that the service is provided at the right price.
At the moment, the users are too often poking their noses in and asking how we generate the compute power and what type of coal we are using. And would it not be better if the coal had Intel stripes rather than AMD logo…
Keeping individual users away from the technimagical stuff is an ideal, in reality though most organisations have governance processes that they use to see they are getting what they are paying for. Would you really have a good confidence level paying for a 3rd party to do your backups with no visibility of the tools they were using, the validation processes they use or where they store them ?