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Forget Cloud Computing. Think As-A-Service!

Posted on June 7, 2008
Filed Under cloud | 3 Comments

S3, EC2, Google App Engine, Gmail, Salesforce.Com are all in the cloud. But what does in the cloud mean? Typically, when you ask people what is cloud computing, that is where the confusion begins. As an industry we always allow the key market makers to spin the bullshit that invariably plunges us into a year long struggle to get a grip of what really is important and what’s not. After a couple of weeks of reading, I can hand-on-heart say that we are now smack bam in the middle of trying to untangle this term we glibly refer to as cloud computing.

Let’s go back a 100 or so years when electricity was not a utility. During this period, different electrical companies offered different electrical services. There were services for street lights, residential lighting, industrial power, street car lights and so on. Also, these companies had different equipment, voltages and frequencies. This accidental complexity required businesses to employ full-time electrical experts that were responsible for liaising with various electrical companies and their services/equipment to quite literally keep the lights on in the building.

Of course, over time, services, equipment, voltages and frequencies were standardised. Knowledge was shared. Electrical companies offered electricity as a utility and a metered service. Companies no longer needed to employ full-time electrical experts nor have on-site, specialised electrical equipment. Now businesses and residential users, like you and me, continue to rely on electricity as a reliable, scalable, dependable and metered service. In fact, we can even piggy back our computer networks over our electricity supply.

No questions asked. Electricity as a service is a given.

Utility computing is offering the same kind of deal for computing resources. Cloud computing is just a commercial extension of utility computing that offers storage and computation cycles as a metered service. Today, you can create an Amazon account and pay for storage and computation cycles using its S3 and EC2 services respectively. Cloud computing goes even further and enables software to be deployed into the cloud thereby providing a platform for distributed computing for the masses.

But here’s the important part. Cloud computing is NOT important, in much the same way that power generators and the national grid don’t interest the everyday electrical consumer. What does interest us are the services, price and relationships with have with the companies that supply electricity. At the moment there are three types of cloud computing services that are currently getting their fair share of air time:

• Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS)
• Software As A Service (SaaS)
• Platform As A Service (PasS)

Over the next year or so, we are going to hear more and more about these services as they enter the mainstream. Yes, the term cloud computing will be used, but those people in the know, they will be looking for the specific services that they wish to make the best use of. Those guys will be the frontrunners.

Phew, I’m getting tired and the sun is shining outside. I think the best thing to do is to drill down into each of the above cloud services in a separate post to keep things small and simple. Until then…see ya!

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