Robert Dempsey has an excellent talk up on Confreaks where he looks at the Ruby language accessing Cloud computing. As Robert knows, Standard Operating Procedure for a high level talk is to define the terms for the audience. For this group the term ‘Ruby’ was a given, so he wisely focused on the Cloud. Lemme recap what he lists as NOT being a Cloud if…
- You cannot buy it with your personal credit card
- They are trying to sell you hardware
- There is no API
- You need to rearchitect your system for it
- it takes more than 10 minutes to provision
- you need to specify the number of machines you want up front
- you own all the hardware
This, in my opinion, is an excellent primer for evaluating that ‘Try our new Cloud Computing Service’ pitch your VAR is feeding you. I can only add one point of my own, as in my mind it is not Cloud Computing if…
- The the business model hinges on lock-in
Value Added Networks (VANs) can have a cloud-like smell to them when they branch beyond simple traffic passing and on into backend processing, but I have difficulty reconciling the lock-in potential. If you cannot shift your system to a new Cloud provider easily, then I believe you are dealing with an entirely different animal. Buyer Be Ware.
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Hi Aaron,
I’m glad you enjoyed the presentation. You make a great point about about lock-in. While a bit of re-architecting of your application might be necessary if you are changing a provider, you should be able to do so relatively painlessly. If you are locked-in though, it is definitely not cloud computing. Thanks for the great addition.
I think I need to disagree with…
“you own all the hardware”
…there are plenty of large organizations interested in internal clouds, where they do own all the hardware.
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