With California's first real rain of the season forecast for Friday, it's time to take stock of another weather system affecting the West (and other places connected to the Internet): cloud computing. Summer 2008 saw a downpour of cloud offerings. We've witnessed whole business ventures billow up and evaporate on the cost and agility promises of cloud computing. While storm systems continue to build off the Pacific coast, the long range forecast is for an unstable system to dump on the landscape for a couple quarters before a high pressure cell clears the air. Despite the instability (and, as if this hackneyed weather metaphor needed more abuse,) it don't take a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows - adoption of cloud computing will continue to rise.
The storm of demand is fed by startups
In the climate of "fail fast"
startups, the appeal of cloud computing as a means of containing cost and improving productivity during the fragile stages of germination is obvious: skip over the infrastructure "muck" and keep your costs tied to your
growth. "Fixed costs are taboo" is the principle directive from many VC's investing in Web startups - put the employees on a sustenance + equity compensation plan, and, for God's sake, don't spend anything on compute infrastructure you don't absolutely need.
A major front accumulates in the enterprise
But what about the enterprise? Enterprises differ from startups in how they evaluate risk and how they spend on IT services. In the enterprise computing landscape, risk averse business leaders are concerned with reliability and control over their services and their data. Control is not one of
the attributes primarily associated with cloud computing, security risks are a major barrier to enterprise adoption, and 99.9% availability is often not good enough for business critical and mission critical services. Further, and for the time being, fixed costs are already baked into the equation in most IT business models. In fact, most large enterprises treat IT as one big fixed cost, which it parcels out to business units according to some "fair share" cost allocation scheme.
Rarely are the business units of a large enterprise satisfied with their cost allocation, let alone the IT services it pays for, but they're captives of myriad barriers like technical complexity, regulatory compliance, data provenance, spending constraints, and limited organizational imagination. One or more of these factors are impediments to any serious consideration of public cloud computing for existing enterprise IT needs. Business consumers of enterprise IT would like to have a secure, reliable, pay-as-you-go public utility service customized to their unique needs, but such a service does not exist. They'd use a public cloud for the cost and agility benefits if they perceived the risks to be acceptable, if their complex needs could be managed, and if they weren't already paying for IT services with funny money.
Public cloud service providers are working on the availability concerns by committing SLA's, and certain security concerns by providing VPN's, but the reality is that the major refactoring of their huge software investments required in order to work in the public cloud will drive many enterprises to build their own cloud-like private infrastructure instead. In fact, any large enterprise is probably already doing this - the practice of building cloud-like infrastructure has been evolving for years under the cover of consolidation and virtualization initiatives.
High clouds are approaching
If predictions of mass consolidation onto public clouds proves true, then enterprise IT might be a dying breed of industrial infrastructure. But just as it took electric power distribution decades to transition from local DC power generation to utility grids, traditional data center bound enterprise IT won't die easily. Enterprises will strive for the kind of efficiency that propels public cloud adoption by continuing investment in consoldiation and virtualization in their own data centers. But consolidation and virtualization alone does not a cloud make, and will leave the consumers of enterprise IT with the same bucket of bits, still wanting for a cloud. So when does one confer cloud status on a consolidated, virtualized environment? The following simple criteria gives a pretty decent working definition:
- When it delivers IT resources as a metered service (rather than an asset or share of an asset,) and
- When all it's services can be accessed programatically.
Yes, the implication here is that cloudhood can be achieved in a private implementation. (This potentially violates certain tenuous claims that cloud services must be provided offsite and by a 3rd party, and that clouds are accessed over the Internet, but we'll not constrain the discussion with those seemingly arbitrary distinctions.)
Of course, the devil is in the details, so the next posts in this series will address more nuanced definitions of cloud computing. In particular, we'll examine the attributes of cloud computing as put forth by other aficionados, and what value and relevance these attributes have to business consumers of enterprise IT.
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