Friday, July 31, 2009

Cloud Computing Momentum

Recently I have seen more oscillation occurring with cloud computing.

I have been noodling a bit for what might be catalyzing this... perhaps the economic tide pushing a new birth (perhaps better put rebirth) of an industry for folks to reshape themselves and keep/grow their business by leveraging their existing base products & services. Could this be the next bubble? Should we hold tight?

It was not so long ago (10+ years) when ASP meant Application Service Providing and Co-Los (Co-Location Facilities) were all the craze. Now we have re-branded them as SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and with the marketing flair up a renewed movement to open standards and collaboration.

Amazon has helped leed the way in regards to this movement. They truly offer some compelling set of functionality that allows for a real "outsourcing" to services you would run internally off and into "the cloud" http://aws.amazon.com/.

It would be an insult (perhaps ignorant) of course to not mention Google. It would also take too much time to hit on the plethora of services. Most are not really that new just in of themselves re-branded. Remember UseNet ? Now marketed as Google Groups (fka DejaNews). It is hard sometimes with Google to draw the line between “the internet” and the “cloud computing” SaaS…but I digress and leave it up to the FTC.

Recently a number of hosting companies (e.g. RackSpace) that are well known have gone marketable cloud and are releasing open source tools to promote interfacing with them as such http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/api

So what is all this difference about? It is about metering... pay as you go and Web 2.0.

Here is great overview of Cloud Computing Use Cases http://www.scribd.com/doc/17929394/Cloud-Computing-Use-Cases-Whitepaper

NIST has only given a working definition thus far http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/index.html at this point.

So I call it a phenomenon and let all things be cloud 100110001000100010011101111


/*
Joe Stein
http://www.linkedin.com/in/charmalloc
*/

2 comments:

  1. I've been wondering, also, if this isn't the next bubble. If it is, I wonder what its life expectancy is.

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  2. According to this research http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-hype-cycle-for-emerging-markets-2009-8 we are still 2-5 years away from mainstream adoption. I think this would begin the inflation of the bubble giving it 2-3 years while the mainstream adoption is occurring before popping (if it does in fact catalyze a market push to begin with).

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