the stinkin’ blog

Now here is an interesting view. A writer on GigaOM writes that he feels cloud computing will be vastly different in 2018. Ok so that is a given since it is 10 years away. I sure hope it is different. While I agree on some points, I have to digress on a number of points.

I do agree that cloud computing vendors (those that are providing the “space”) will change dramatically in the next 10 years. They will need to address the needs of the “end user” no matter who that person or organization serves. They will need to be easy to work with, provide significant service and be available to everyone. The best ones will be able to charge premiums for value added services and the worst will fall by the wayside. That is easy to see.

However, I do not agree that the user experience will be an “Apple type” of experience. While I agree that Apple does well with eye candy on their Mac and iPhone, I despise iTunes. The author seems to think that iTunes is elegant and successful. I am so sorry to inform you that the only reason iTunes is successful is because the iPod is successful. You see iTunes is REQUIRED for the iPod. It is forced upon anyone that wants to use the iPod or iPhone for that matter. So one can hardly say it is successful by itself. The other term used is “elegant” and while I agree that the iTunes application itself is fairly pretty, it is not altogether very useful and it is a pain in my rear. Why do I think that? Well, every time I go to use it, Apple forces an update on me and with that update they require quicktime (which does not save my settings!!!) and keep pushing Safari on me - I only have one windows box in my house, no macs and I HATE how Apple hawks their wares on my useless windows box. I only want iTunes and I only want it because they force me to use it to make my (free) iPod shuffle work right. Ok…so much for my complaining.

While I do not agree with the Apple user experience notion, I do agree that cloud computing will be vastly different in years to come. I know that users will force companies to change their experience and I also know that the cloud vendor with the best user experience, best presence, and best service will win. That is a given.

The question will be who will that company be? Just like we are waiting in the wind to have a better virtualization experience we will be waiting for the consolidation of the cloud computing environment for several years to come.

A writer on OStatic writes an interesting point. One that I have been pondering for a while since doing some catching up on the emerging trends around cloud computing. If open source is such a win for the cloud computing infrastructure and those that are building apps, why then are we seeing so many proprietary “clouds” which offer no interaction? Federation of clouds is the key to maintaining an edge by ISVs.

A ISV cannot afford to put all of their eggs in one basket. A great example is for those that use Amazon and S3. When S3 went down a few weeks ago everyone using S3 went down with it. Nine hours of downtime for a small company could run it into the ground quickly. The question is how do you prevent outages from affecting your application? Federation would be an answer.

Most cloud computing vendors like Amazon, Google, and others do not interact together at all. If I want to host on Amazon ECS and on Google Apps I am forced to write two different “standards”. While there are open standards that are being built for cloud computing collaboration we need to devise a way to allow cloud users to distribute applications amongst a number of providers. The best providers will stand up and can charge a premium whilst the worst ones will go away (either through acquisition or simple death).

But there is more than simply calling a cloud federated. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed such as authentication, data storage and syncronization, and application communication in addition to being able to run the application in a number of unrelated cloud instances.

Interesting issues. Time to find out more.