I have been hearing more and more about “cloud computing” and how it will become the nexus of everything new in computing. This trend reminds me of an alien abduction – when an innocent victim is grabbed from their bed by beings from a different world, poked and probed, and returned with a vague notion of having been violated.
Amazon, Google and IBM were the first to really put cloud computing out in the public eye. Amazon targeted small businesses with their S3 and EC2 services offering compute and storage for a metered rate. Google came out with the idea of allowing 3rd parties to run massively parallel applications on the Google compute cloud. IBM jumped in with their Blue Cloud initiative targeted at a similar audience of people looking to build new types of applications that require public access to a massive shared grid of compute nodes. Many companies in research and commercial industries have built grids of compute nodes, but these are all private facilities that run that company’s applications. Amazon, Google and IBM have a new idea – or at least are talking about a new way of democratizing the technology – and it deserves a new term. Cloud is cool.
Like any new term that catches the imagination of the market, a lot of companies tend to pile on and abduct it. They then use the new buzzword as an umbrella term for a wide range of things that already exist, may never exist, or never deserved to exist in the first place. I wonder if the guys at Google, Amazon, and IBM are feeling that vague sense of having been violated.
I have heard cloud computing, Web 2.0, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Online backup, Enterprise grids, and even email and messaging all be jumbled up in conversations with usually savvy people who have just been confused by the blizzard of abstractions. In a recent Business Week interview, Shane Robison of HP refused to define cloud computing, which is probably wise – it is too new an idea to constrain yet. However, I believe there are several things being called cloud that definitely are not new, and should not be used to pollute what cloud will become.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – SaaS is application software that runs on the service provider’s shared infrastructure that you can use via a web interface. Salesforce.com is probably the best example. Google apps are an emerging example. It is different from application hosting, where a client company rents computing infrastructure and applications that are dedicated to them. Hosting has been around for years. Oracle and SAP offer large enterprise application hosting services. SaaS is new, and is a new way to offer software, but is different from cloud computing in that the applications available are chosen by the service provider, not the client customer.
Enterprise Clouds – I have heard people refer to their company’s compute grid as a “cloud” which may be conceptually accurate, but it is a very different animal than a “public cloud.” We’ve called these ‘grids’ for some time and people generally know what that means. Why fuzzy it up?
Managed Backup Service– A number of companies are offering online storage capacity for a metered fee. There are scads of consumer or SMB-oriented companies offering this service, and a handful of enterprise level services from companies like Iron Mountain or Symantec have also emerged. This is a pretty well understood idea. Definitely not new. Definitely not “cloud.”
Storage-as-a-Service - This idea goes back a long way, with Storage Networks being the most spectacular failure in the enterprise segment of this market. The idea of putting the data in the network accessed by applications either on premise or in another network just seems to add more complexity than is needed. Either remote it all (application hosting) or keep it all (enterprise computing). Amazon’s S3 is this type of service, with the expectation that only applications that can live with the service level and performance will use S3. I would bet that most S3 customers also pick up the companion offering for compute, called EC2. The combination of S3 and EC2 definitely qualifies as “cloud computing.” Individually, S3 is a stretch to be called cloud computing.
Web 2.0 – This is a great example of coining a generic term and then allowing the definition to evolve. To most people, Web 2.0 is web services which support interaction and collaboration over the internet, as opposed to Web 1.0 which was either reference content or commerce. Facebook, MySpace, photo sharing, instant messaging, even email would count in this very broad umbrella term. Ultimately, Web 2.0 and cloud computing may come together if a new class of cloud-based social networking applications emerge, but that is not here yet.
I think what contributes to the confusion is that all of these ideas depend on common infrastructure technologies to deliver. All of them need scalable compute. All of them need scale-out storage to support the large data requirements. This encourages the infrastructure vendors to generalize and call them all by the hot new cloud computing term. To the vendors, the distinction between these services is inconvenient. To the providers and users of these services, the distinction is everything. New ideas need some room to be different and establish a unique added value. Most of all, they need to be developed and defined by the people delivering them, not the vendors supporting them.
It’s sort of like “Green” computing. I am all for environmental awareness and reduction in resource consumption. But we’ve all seen some pretty routine activities lumped under a company’s “green” initiatives. It’s like the marketing groups woke up one day and suddenly had to tell their story with a “green” filter. Perhaps they had been brainwashed in the night. Perhaps they had alien visitors.
Perhaps they were little green men….
