Nailing down the Cloud - A Definition for Cloud Computing?

Just about everything in the tech space is being sprinkled with a bit of ‘cloud’ magic right now. Anyone with a data center product, hosted application or storage service is sliding it under the ‘cloud’ umbrella. It is somewhat ironic, given the recent Amazon outages, but there is no doubting that cloud computing is hot.

Clouds in the Setting Sun

Cloud computing blogs are popping up all over (James Urquhart’s “The Wisdom of Clouds” being a personal favorite - check out his updated “Cloud Computing Bill of Rights“). But what exactly is cloud computing?

Cue “Cloud Computing Defined” on Mashable. The post went up before the weekend, its the conversation in the comments I’ve been watching. Cloud Computing is somewhat blackbox-like for those trapped outside. All the more reason for a good definition, and a good understanding of you might be dragging your business into (or at least the IT infrastructure).

Starting for what it isn’t, Mark Hopkin, on the Mashable blog, quotes Mike Elgan (the names are dropping left, right and center(re) ):

“Cloud computing” has been used to mean grid computing, utility computing, software as a service, Internet-based applications, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing and remote processing. When most people use the term, they may have one of these ideas in mind, but the listener might be thinking about something else.

Or to put it another way, it is the marketing umbrella of the day (Kool-Aid if you must). OK, so what should we be looking out for in cloud then? In the 90’s, in my consulting engineering days, we would draw grandiose architecture diagrams. In the middle would be clouds.

The clouds represented the ’something magic happens in here… will figure out how later’. And for me, that is part of the essence of cloud computing. It takes a boat load of complexity that deals with storage, process distribution and many other things too hard and dull to think about and puts them in a neat box. As a user (in the sense of programmer, as well as end-user), you simply don’t have to worry about what happens in the middle. It just happens, and it is 24×7. I like Doug Klein’s comment:

In the networking cloud bad things happen all the time. Routers die, packets get dropped, loops occur. What has evolved over the decades, however, is a sophisticated and mature set of recovery tools; applications, protocols, processes all designed to detect, work around, patch and recover from failures. For cloud computing to realize its full potential we have to go through the same learning curve. It’s not impossible but it is certainly an order of magnitude more complicated give the much more varied nature of the situation.

Mark harks back to those early networking days (with a quick name check for MCI nee Worldcom). The fact is, from a technology standpoint it might be tricky to put a finger on exactly what cloud computing is, other than a moving feast, but from a business one it is this: The next generation of IT outsourcing, staring us right in the face.

A little addendum… Even the register is on the case: “Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty“.

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