For a ‘summer period’, it seems to be a busy time with lots of chatter and a lot of “hot topics” keeping my in-box warm. The problem is that looking so far ahead takes our focus off what we’re actually doing.
Cloud computing seems to be everywhere but what is it? I suspect it’s another one of those terms that start as a throw-away comment to be followed by the vendors telling us why they are the natural choice in that sphere.
David Chappell has entered the melee with a white paper on the subject. For those not familiar with him, David is a freelance consultant who tends towards Microsoft & a very charismatic speaker. Having said that he is also quite pragmatic, and my precis of the paper is “When we talk about Cloud Computing we could mean one of three things…”. With that I’ll leave you to follow this link & get the paper.
One view is that the cloud can be a group of server resources which can be provisioned with a suitable operating system (usually one of the Linux family a la Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2″). The only bit of that model that could be considered a “Cloud” is that you are never really sure where it is running & frankly there isn’t a huge amount that you can commerically gain from running Linux instances somewhere.
Adding to the chatter is the emerging web application platforms, programming languages that are hosted out there so that you can write code & have it run on your behalf somewhere. Google Apps is one of the leaders here.
Mircrosoft joined the fray recently with the SSDS offering, SQL Server Data Services – a hosted 500MB of SQL Server space.
When all of the hype dies down, I suspect that we will start to see more useful functionality coming out that will allow us to benefit from cloud computing.
How about a small business owner who puts in a broadband line with a router & a thin-client terminal for the three people in his company. He then goes to his ISP’s web site and logs into the Cloud Manager and contracts for:
• Windows desktops with office applications
• Email
• CRM
• Web presence
• Document storage & search
As the business grows, the cost of acquisition of new services scales easily and can be disposed of as easily as it can be acquired. No need for administration of the software, it’s all patched by the hosting operation & backed up daily. Similarly with applications, accounting systems can be run in this cloud.
Now I can start to see some business benefits, but nothing wholly new.
Hmm…it’s the web applications that I have difficulty with. What would be useful in our scenario above is giving people information – how about a customised desktop & simple task monitoring. How about simple data query from my CRM system.
I come back to the start of this entry; are we too busy looking far into the future to see that we could do some marvelous things right now that help our customers. We’ll keep watching the developments to see what else is useful – watch this space
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