Cloudscaling

It is called Cloud computing for a reason. Cloud computing is the ability for many “certified” people to access a computing resource anywhere, anytime. The only requirement is that they have secure access to the internet.

It is not called "sky computing", if that was the case anyone anywhere could access the data and all the data would be shared. Maybe Sky computing will have its day, today it’s “The Cloud”.

Working for Digital Equipment from 85 to 95 I saw the growth of DECNET in the field. That was a dispersed but very controlled network. It gave uses access to data they never had in the past but on a single VAX.

Working in the Business Intelligence field for the past seven years I have seen the growth of VM. With VMs growth corporate users were willing to give up control of what CPU or server their data was running and on. By doing so they gained the ability to quickly request additional computing services without the two+ month wait for a new server to be ordered and be upgraded from corporate IT.

To me this was the beginning of “The Cloud” and with it the acceptance of the corporate user to trust the management of their servers to a trusted partner. The next stage in corporate computing has begun, “The Cloud”.

Leaving a position in business analytics behind I now work for Online Tech (http://www.onlinetech.com) We are a managed data center business that is providing cloud computing to businesses across the Midwest looking for a better way to securely access their data without the limitations of the past.

simple and enlightening presentation

Slides 5 and 7 are the one's that I can 100% see in my experience.

Slide 5: The 10X factor is no guess. What happens when internal competition arrives is that the 10X can go down to 5X or maybe even 2X, but it never seems to go any lower. This argues that there is a fundamental organizational cost at work.

Slide7: There is definitely an element of 'hand crafting' involved. Not all the cause is due to the organizational structure, some of it is due to the commercial application world. What has driven enterprise IT into wanting/needing virtual servers is the one application/server model. With IT permeating all aspects of business life, the number of applications in a complicated organization, such as a major hospital can exceed 750 and start to approach 1000. And many of these servers are hand built or custom 'tuned' to the app vendor's specifications. Sure, we may start out with a 'vanilla image or template' but it soon deviates as new software sub-systems are added, version levels are changed due to incompatibilities, etc, etc. VMWare act's more like a better inventory system, i.e. we can instantiate a new server out of inventory fairly quickly. It turns into an enabler of even more applications gated only by the demands of those applications to deviate from the template.

Thanks for the comment. I appreciate it. You make a lot of sense. While it's true the images can be a sort of better inventory system, it's also true that this is a broken model.

We definitely need to move towards enabling 'platforms' as the step beyond infrastructure such that developers can get what they need in the lowest friction manner possible.