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October 01, 2009

4 things that are killing cloud computing

Surprisingly, both cloud proponents and cloud providers are among those damaging the cloud's prospects for success

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As I talk to people about cloud computing, it's interesting to see two major camps: One camp is composed of those who consider cloud computing to be the second coming of IT, and thus demand that you bow down to Google App Engine and Amazon EC2. The other camp includes those who see cloud computing as evil, a bubble, or a passing fad. (Very few people form the third camp: those who look at cloud computing the way everyone should look at cloud computing, namely as architectural options that can improve efficiencies and lower costs.)

In an ironic twist, there are forces out there, in both the pro and con camps, hurting the potential value of cloud computing -- potentially to the point of killing cloud computing. They are:

 

  • Overhyped Google Gmail outages
  • The "cloud everything" crowd
  • The "cloud is evil" crowd
  • The cloud providers themselves

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Gmail outages hype
The issue around the Gmail outages, including the one that occurred last week, is not the outages themselves but the fact that every pundit with a blog account calls for the end of cloud computing because Gmail tanked for a few hours. Let's get this straight: E-mail systems go down, whether on-premise or cloud-delivered, and if you think you're going to ever get 100 percent uptime, you're dreaming. The uptime record for Gmail is more impressive than that of most enterprise e-mail systems. Also, Gmail is free, where enterprise e-mail systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in software, hardware, and salaries for those charged with maintaining them.

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sbils 1-Oct-09 6:11am
David, Absolutely agree that one of the factors slowing cloud adoption is the inability of cloud and SaaS apps to 'fit' into existing IT, especially into their existing management processes. Coincidentally here at Conformity (http://www.conformity-inc.com)we just announced yesterday the first GA release of our solution which provides CIOs and IT organizations a centralized point of management and control for SaaS and cloud apps and users. Our platform is focused on helping to address many of these issues around 'manageability' for the enterprise.... Scott Bils
starr.darren 1-Oct-09 6:31am
Great article. It was amazing to hear all the complaints when Gmail went down. Who among that loud chorus is maintaining a more reliable email service for a lower cost? The anti-cloud group can be so extreme that rather than concede some space to the cloud, where its an appropriate solution, they'll walk away in protest of losing a small pie of their pie. The cloud is like any tool. Its appropriate in some situations and not in others. Like any IT change, there should be a solid business case for the change and the appropriate amount of research should be done. Darren Starr, http://1starr.com
sbaeder 1-Oct-09 8:57am
1 reply
David - Spell checkers are nice, but nothing beats reading the posting after it is up... Is it really an "iron twist" (how ironic)... And I'm not sure that there is a "crow" that touts that everything is a cloud... BUT, other than that - good points!
Loerps 1-Oct-09 11:09am
sbaeder, I agree that "iron twist" was probably meant to be "ironic twist", but I had no problem with David's wording on "the 'cloud everything' crow". He was obviously referring to the act of "crowing" about cloud computing. Since to "crow" is to brag, or talk incessantly, and that's exactly what the 'cloud everything' folks are doing, to refer to it this way was perfectly fine.

You might get more out of these blogs if you focused more on the content and less on your own interpretation of the writers style.

tomaddox 1-Oct-09 9:12am
How about #5: bloggers who have their heads in the sand about the cloud's limitations. You want to hand-wave away the security issues, when it's known that Google trawls people's emails and physical security is not even an option. The stability issues are perhaps less troublesome and more a matter of trust than anything else, but, strangely, enterprise operations enjoy having control over their own systems so that outages can be handled on a priority basis instead of being reliant on a provider's sense of how important an outage is.
The real issue is one of trust, and companies that actually make money aren't going to trust their vital systems to an unproven service. Talk to me in five years, and let's see how much data has walked out of Google or Amazon (or leaked into them, for that matter).
marcrix 1-Oct-09 11:56am
Hmmm...hasty judgment of isolated failures, fanatical extremists, and narrow minded vendors...isn't that what "killed" SOA? I think this just part and parcel to being the new fad on the block. The dust will settle, the market will select for levelheadedness, and the cloud will find its niche.
RightPaddock 1-Oct-09 9:07pm
GMail is not free!! It is funded by advertising which adds to the cost of every product and service advertised on Google sites. Consumers of those products and services pay those costs irrespective of whether or not they use GMail.

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