For a year and a half we’ve been hearing a lot about how Cloud Computing is going to save companies millions of dollars, make it cheap for Startups and small businesses to compete with the big guys, and solve other countless problems which I won’t even start to name. You’d think, considering all the hype, that it was the second coming of Christ, not a lofty marketing term which pretty much everyone has co-opted. At first glance it appears as though Cloud Computing is the next Internet, and who wouldn’t want to be involved in that? The problem is that because the whole industry has take this term and made it mean whatever they want, it now means nothing. More accurately, it means whatever the people who use the term “Cloud” want it to mean, and that’s extremely dangerous.
At a conference I attended awhile ago we broke off into several teams to discuss what we thought cloud computing was. This was doomed for failure, but what I noticed and what seemed to be lost on everyone in the crowd was that everyone came up with an answer that solved the problems they have to deal with in their profession, day after day. We didn’t come up with a magical definition, and this exercise has since become kind of a pastime at Cloudcamps / Conference, etc because nobody has ever come up with a good answer, and nobody ever will.
Until we stop thinking about the Cloud as a product, and start thinking about it as a concept, we’re all wasting precious time
It’s time for me to append my opinion to what is already a littered landscape of ontology. Honestly this is the best thing I’ve ever heard someone say about cloud computing, and it didn’t come from an engineer, the marketing department, a blogger, a techie, a social media consultant, or someone on twitter. It came from a Barista at my local Starbucks. She asked what I did, and I told her, and she was more curious about what it meant, so I begrudgingly went into a few details and she quickly replied back with “So it’s just easy”.
That’s it. It’s just Easy.
Cloud Computing is Easy.
Easy is why Joyent is great – You get a powerful system and signing up is quick, simple and Elegant.
Easy is why Amazon is kicking everyones ass. You can get 100′s of virtual machines crunching away at your data by running a single command.
Easy is why platforms and services that do Billing, Advertising, Customer Feedback, Authentication, Store your Data and Backup your Files are successful. Because it took the effort of a small group of people to build something that could be re-used over and over and over again by the masses, made so easy that having a credit card is the hardest part.
I recently asked people on Twitter “if they couldn’t call their magic “Cloud Computing” for one day, what would they call it”. The purpose was to make people think about it for one second. What do you ACTUALLY do. You don’t actually build cloud computing environments do you? No. Do you build hosting environments? Do you host software? Do you build or run platforms? Do you do anything like this? If you can tell me what you do without using the word “Cloud” then we can have a discussion, and if the power you provide can be made as easy as clicking a button or including a library, then maybe, MAYBE, you’ll have the right to wrestle it back.