OK – So this is going to be contentious… ah well, I’ve never shied away from that. I wonder if it isn’t in fact time to ease off on the whole “Cloud Computing” term. While this might sound a little heretical, bear with me here…
I’ve been running a bunch of CloudCamps around the place – and a common issue I’ve come up against is being part of sessions where half the crowd are talking high stack level stuff, while the other half is talking infrastructure. It’s easy to see how this occurs – the term “Cloud Computing” covers a huge variety of things – from customer applications, down to the millions of Amazon servers spinning away – along with everything in-between. It’s not surprising there’s sometimes a disconnect between people involved in the cloud.
In the early days of the cloud (hey – a whole few years ago) we needed a term we could hang our hats on – something that was all encompassing and, to a certain extent, something that let us find some commonality in the fight for legitimacy against the legacy vendors and their well articulated, and well funded FUD.
But we’re in a different world now – everyone does cloud, from the most traditional vendor to the smallest startup. Cloud is, to a greater or lesser extent, the default and because of that the term becomes problematic.
This sounds a little funny coming from someone who edits on of the preeminent Cloud blogs, runs Cloud events and attends pretty much every cloud focused event – while I think the term cloud still has legs, I believe its days are numbered. When we’re all doing cloud, and there’s simply nothing else, the term will fade into our collective memories. As Ric Telford from IBM said in his Cloud Connect keynote in San Jose:
in five years time, cloud will be the new normal
Admittedly that was pretty much the only thing that Ric said that wasn’t tainted with what was a recurrent problem at Cloud Connect, CloudWash. It seemed that every traditional vendor was calling their product cloud this or cloud that, whether or not there was anything ever remotely cloud-like about it. As I remarked during one of the vendor pitches sessions:
and:
And don’t believe for a moment it was only IBM that was talking this way – a number of other vendors were taking a similar line: Oracle, HP and Dell to name just a few.
Of course dropping the cloud moniker won’t result in marketing departments all across the globe jumping on the latest theme du jour, but perhaps it’ll lessen the hype. After all the cloud is really to good to be wasted…
Hi Ben, I think I am going to agree with you but coming from a different angle. See my posting at http://topaccountants.com/2010/03/03/why-cloud-is-the-perfect-term/.
Cloud is a great term for 99.9% of the business world who are not techies. It means we can “not go there” in terms of asking any more.
The problems you describe are unique to techies and, yes, perhaps they should stop using the term Cloud and be a bit more precise, and professional.
You’re spot on Ben. I blogged about something similar last week, confusing layers of the SPI model. I’ve thought recently that we need to REALLY differentiate between the different SPI layers and try and remove the friction between SaaS and P/IaaS events… so instead of cloudcamp maybe iaas camp???
JP
Interesting comment Adrian. I’ve used the phrase “cloud computing” with non-techies in reference to small business and productivity applications, and I don’t think it’s a good term to use with them. Most people either sound or look confused. You almost have to explain it every time with words and associations that they actually understand.
Unless you’re familiar with the web, I don’t think the term means much at all. Most non-techies can’t even grasp the general concept of how the internet works, I can’t imagine what they’re thinking when someone mentions “cloud computing”.
I think it’s a definite buzzword, similar to “going green”. It will likely die out because of overuse. I stay away from it already and stick to the basics.
Cloud is useful as Adrian says to describe things to non-techies at a very high level of abstraction or to debate high level policy issues (privacy for example).
However, even for non-techies, I find that you rapidly need to get beyond “well the difference is that when you use the cloud, instead of all the action happening here on your server, with your own licensed software and hardware, that stuff gets done in the cloud”.
When businesses are being asked to rely on “the cloud” for critical parts of their own service or product delivery, naturally enough they want to know who, why, what, where, how.
That is when the cloud analogy starts to just get … well .. a little foggy.
Maybe we need to refine it – SaaS=cirrus; P/IaaS=cumulonimbus
Rick – but what about Stratus? You can’t forget poor stratus!
Great comments everyone – many thanks…
I’m in two minds about this. As an ex-meteorologist I can relate to the analogy. As a techno-cynic I’m wary of fads and buzzwords.
I think people sometimes need to have a flag to rally beneath. And “distributed, configurable computing camp” is such a mouthful.