There are probably as many definitions for cloud computing as there are people talking about it. Simon Wardley is one of my favourite speakers and he has given some excellent talks about cloud computing. Few focus on the definitions of what is cloud computing. If I would choose some of Mr. Wardley’s definitions it would be the definition of how a sysadmin would define cloud computing. Of course much of this depends on what type of cloud computing we are talking about. Is it like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS)? For example, Amazon is the market leader in IaaS, Microsoft’s Azure is a cloud platform (PaaS) for running generic applications in their own cloud and Salesforce.com is an example of a SaaS vendor for running a their own specific CRM application in Salesforce’s cloud. All are very much different, and someone might argue Salesforce.com actually not being a cloud offering since they have been in the market long before term cloud computing was even publicly mentioned.
There are a few common denominators, though, with the offerings which I would rate as a cloud offering. First of all, they should not have significant upfront costs, but should be based on usage based billing. The offering should also be elastic which allows the client to add and decrease resource used how they see fit in a self-service manner. This should be possible in nearly real time. This is like Mr. Wardley states, commoditization of IT. The analogue of seeing cloud computing as an electricity grid is brilliant. We are not quite there yet, but are not falling too far away. We are now kind of in state that if a company would go with the IaaS offering, you are basically buying the turbine of a water electricity plant, but you still need a lot of expertise in getting the electricity to your factory, which is building, for example, rubber ducks. If you go with the PaaS offering, you can do with fewer people and need only the people creating the application to, for example, designing the 3D model of your next… superduper rubber duck. If you then again go with the SaaS offering, you can – maybe – get the application almost or completely ready for your specific needs and can do only with the person designing the next superduper rubber duck hit.
So the question of how to make money in cloud markets? Of course it all depends about the resources and where to put the most focus on. All in all, a company building rubber ducks is not interested in running the electricity plant, nor do they want to develop applications, they just want to create the ducks as cheap as possible and sell as good profit as possible. So they would like the SaaS option to be the best if it would be available. They would need someone to create the offering for 3D rubber duck design application. Let’s say I would start offering the application… I then have to find the cheapest way to deliver the application with all the underlying levels, infrastructure, platform and service which I could then sell for the best available price. I am dreaming of an application delivery which would use different clouds for different levels (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), mixing those to build the most “insert your adjective here” service. Surely, we are not there yet.
SaaS though, is nothing new. There are and have been companies selling SaaS offerings for years and something like Google with their Apps and Gmail and many others is a great example of this. Though, having Google running all the companies applications would make the company totally dependent on Google. If Google were to have a problem, all services would be down. On the other hand (I guess you were waiting for this), if the company would have gone with two different turbines, for example buying the infrastructure level from Amazon and say, GoGrid, and built the application on top of those vendors, redundancy could be achieved. Probably not high-availability, but there would be some ways of creating a disaster recovery plan. You would not be locked in to Google. Or then you just assume Google will not go down, or prepare for this in your SLA.
I rather like the US apps.gov site, which allows government customers to add services in a shopping basket and then roll with those. I would imagine there is a lot of a resource backing this up, but this looks great from the customer viewpoint. I would like to see a similar service for consumers and companies, though I really don’t know how the apps.gov goes after you checkout your SharePoint for 65k (did I mention something about upfront costs?). If the implementation is something involving HA and not vendor lock-in, this starts to sound good. Anyway, I like this, though it does sound like a one more definition of cloud computing.
Pauli Haikonen
