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Cloud = Outsourcing 2.0
By dhill | June 6, 2008
There has been a remarkable amount of blog banter about what constitutes a cloud. Most of the arguments have some merit, others are self serving attempts to shape our collective understanding to commercial ends.
For the average reader however, I think much of this banter has done more to confuse than clarify the notion of cloud computing. In many cases the confusion stems from arguments that don’t differentiate between cloud offerings and the technologies that enable them.
What constitutes a cloud service depends largely on the perspective of the user. For users of cloud services, each of these offerings provides a different demarcation point between the value you want to create and the necessary evils you require to support your creation.
- If your value-add is a unique idea you want to share, Wordpress and Google Docs take care of the input, formating and large scale distribution of text so you can focus on the craft of writing.
- If your value-add is the creation of a community to support an event, Ning and EventBrite take care of membership, collaboration and coordination so you can focus your energies on creating a great event.
- If your value-add is providing an web page that helps people track wildfires in California, Coghead and BungeeLabs provide you with a way to easily integrate data sources and generate visualizations so you can focus on getting the data to those affected quickly and intuitively.
- And if your value-add is delivering a new life-streaming application to millions of adoring users, Amazon Web Services and Joyent take care of providing you with scalable virtual machines, storage and internet connectivity so you can focus on coding the features you will need to compete with Twitter and FriendFeed (best of luck on that…).
From the user’s point of view, these are all cloud computing offerings. In every case, they outsource the ‘necessary evils’ required to deliver the user’s creation. The common threads that both bind these outsourced offerings together under the cloud umbrella and differentiate them from outsourcing offerings of the past are that they are all:
- Self-service
- Pay-per-use
- Internet scale
As a user, I don’t care if the service provider is using Enomalism, 3Tera, Elastra, or armies of sys-admins on Redbull and steroids to deliver me the service. As long as I can get it when I want it, pay only for what I use, and have it scale with my needs, then I’m a happy guy (is that really so much to ask???). To the Service Provider it may make the difference between making money and going broke, but that’s an implementation discussion to be argued by the attendees of CloudCamp. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the definition of Cloud.
So lets try to separate the services from the implementation and recognize that Cloud is not a revolution, its just an evolution of an age old business model - outsourcing stuff for people that they don’t want to do.
…crossposted to BitCurrent
Topics: Cloud Computing |