Following a recent exchange on one of LinkedIn’s Cloud Computing interest groups, I was struck by how different – and frankly confused at times – the various writers’ definitions were of what Cloud Computing supposedly is. Following the topic in the media one is also confronted with a plethora of at times contradictory definitions. And when you add to all that the marketing messages companies send out about their Cloud Computing offerings, no wonder a newcomer to the space gets confused.
So, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the punditry, I’d like to propose some grouping around how the term Cloud Computing seems most commonly used in the press and marketing literature. As I see it, it groups into three flavors:
1) For some, any SaaS application is “in the cloud” and thus is good enough to be deemed Cloud Computing. As long as some server somewhere does my calculations for me, instead of my trusty old PC right here, it’s “Cloud Computing”. Google Apps, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Intacct, and many, many others claim this, very broad definition of Cloud Computing as a description of what they do.
2) Get a bit more tightly defined, and people will say it’s “elastic compute infrastructure”. I.e. enabled by a virtualization layer that abstracts the OS from the underlying hardware, the resulting “virtual” software servers can be provisioned more easily, literally at the push of a button. Amazon or Rackspace are two common examples that illustrate this definition of “Cloud Computing”.
So, if I can ramp server capacity up or down like a utility to host my applications or run more applications on a piece of hardware (more of the focus of “private clouds”) courtesy of the above-mentioned virtualization, the potential efficiency gains for an IT department are obvious.
This definition of “Cloud Computing” is complementary to the above, “SaaSy” definition and not a replacement. A SaaS app like, say, Google Docs doesn’t necessarily have to run on a virtualized infrastructure like it’s described in this bullet.
3) Now, for the real esoteric, there is emerging talk about “Web 3.0” as the application-facing corollary to the still mostly server-side “Cloud Computing” discussion alluded to in my second bullet.
What is less obvious by strictly focusing on the server-side of the discussion, however, is how the Cloud Computing technology shift impacts application design. I.e. what new software usage models will this technology shift enable beyond the increasingly ubiquitous SaaS models alluded to in the first bullet?
For one, commonly talked about along this line of reasoning is the ability to more rapidly prototype and launch new software services on a cloud infrastructure. Gone are the long waits to provision a hardware server, and if demand suddenly takes off, turning on a few more virtual servers is no big deal.
Google Chrome OS, for example, is more than a browser, as it strives to separate the application layer from the OS. Thus eventually making not only the provisioning of compute power (see bullet 2 above) completely flexible, but also the type of endpoint I want to consume that compute power on. I.e. I flexibly could access the same app on my laptop, my netbook, my smartphone, or eventually even my refrigerator or my car.
Mashups are another “Web 3.0ish” example for how applications eventually might get composed and consumed differently from today, facilitated but an underlying Cloud Computing infrastructure.
There are more examples, but you might see that this notion of “Web 3.0″ is a more far-fetched definition of Cloud Computing. But my sense is that over time, esp. as mobile devices and mobile access proliferate, will become more and more relevant, especially since this way the discussion will focus on the “revenue benefits” of Cloud Computing vs. the financially less attractive cost-reduction aspects of the Cloud Computing definition in bullet 2.
Hopefully with the above clarifications, it will be easier to categorize statements about Cloud Computing in terms of the observed categorization above. Two practical links for more information about Cloud Computing are:
- A list of cloud related reading materials is here: http://www.btclogic.com/pov/resources.cfm
- A somewhat more technical definition of what Cloud Computing is can be found here: http://www.btclogic.com/documents/BTCLogic_CloudComputing_Why.pdf
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