By George M. Tomko
Cloud computing. What a concept. Most people can remember days as a child, laying in the grass, looking up at the sky and imagining the shapes formed by clouds as they moved slowly by. There was something very majestic and beautiful, yet powerful. Some clouds were very thin and high in the sky and others were puffy and so low that you felt like you could touch them if you reached high enough.
Clouds usually signaled change. Black clouds brought storms. Overcast and cloudy days brought dreariness and sadness. Overall, a bright, clear day was almost always held in higher regard than cloudy days.
S0, as I ponder this notion of “cloud” computing, I have to say that it brings mixed feelings. Like my childhood days, I can imagine the cloud shapes and what they might represent. But, at the end, they morph into something else and disperse. But most of all, they take a clear sunny day and mess it all up.
I have been in this business long enough to know that clouds, as metaphors, have been plenty useful in talking about IT concepts — but mostly networks. It was the closest thing to a “black box” as there ever has been to enable someone to quickly get to the point that when you connect up to the cloud, your data comes out as it passes through some route to get to its destination. It did not mattter what the route was — the cloud served as the curtain, behind which everything got figured out just fine — not to worry.
Now, CIOs are being asked to consider a concept where the network, the servers, the SAN and the applications are going to move into the cloud, out-of-site, under the control of invisible minions and untold consoles. And – guess what – at significantly reduced cost. Some claim of cost reductions that are orders of magnitude lower like here. ["With the advent of Cloud Computing, the cost of computation, application hosting and content storage and delivery is plunging fast by several orders of magnitude." ]
That’s a stretch. Hyperbole. Total, unadulterated marketing hype.
Can I buy into a computing grid? – Yes. Can I buy networked storage? – Yes. Can I buy software hosted and set-up elsewhere and accessible via the network? – Yes. Can I run applications on virtual servers? – Yes?
Can I buy a cloud? – No. Not really. Pieces, maybe. Who should I buy from? Depends. Depends on what? Depends on who signed the “manifesto”. Might also depend on which company buys who. Oh yeah, and we are still working on the security architecture. But don’t worry, we will take good care of all of your data that is housed in our cloud but, we cannot guarantee that if you have a cloud from another supplier, that you can access that data from the non-”standard” cloud. Also, you may not be on the proper release of the cloud.
Marketing and sales often oversell and underdeliver. They are often farther ahead in ideas than the production folks are in reality. This can be a good and healthy tension when the gap is not so wide, otherwise, the pressure to deliver is intense and failure is a possibility. The major gap that I see here is the difference between offering the “plumbing” and having the applications follow along.
Utility computing is a term I hear and it is good to think of the commoditized portions of the IT space in that manner. However, CIOs have to worry about data and applications.
Actually, CIOs have to worry about a lot of things. And, given the high stakes gambit of major change — especially technology change — there is as much to do with crafting the message — the essence of the true value proposition that is understood and mutually agreed.
On this score, I would think that black boxes would do the trick. A black box is a symbol that connotes containment, structure, and a solid. It’s a “brick” which is part of a bigger “wall”. Clouds, however, are amorphous, structure-less, sprawling uncontained wisps of vapor. Very hard to build a mental foundation upon.
Years and years ago, I worked in the IT department that provided voice and data communications to a large multinational enterprise. We had a campus of 26 buildings and nearly 6,000 employees. One day, a water pipe broke and flooded the telephone switch room, knocking out all phones for more than half of the buildings. Unfortunately, one of those phones was carrying a call between our CEO and the CEO of our largest customer and the call was dropped at a crucial point in the conversation.
The next day, the CEO called us in and gave us a lecture on his expectations for telephone service. He went to his window and looked out at the sun and the blue sky and said, “Gentlemen, just as God has given us the blue sky and the sun, so too has he given us dial tone. Just as I expect to see the sun every day at dawn, I expect that every day, when I pick up the phone, there will be dial tone!”
I am just glad that I did not have to explain anything about a cloud getting in the way of the blue sky and the sun.