By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
6/17/2008
Even though my days as an IT practitioner are behind me, I feel a certain obligation to keep up with the latest computing trends in the industry. Not just at the application level, but on the hardware and system software level too. Hence, I’ve made some effort to understand things like virtualization and grid computing. Just when I thought I was all up to date, along comes a new concept – Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing is everywhere lately. And I've heard the term enough that I decided it’s time to learn what the heck this thing is. RSR’s duty is to keep our readers informed, and we take that responsibility seriously.
I started my hunt in Wikipedia. When I first looked at it on Saturday I was completely befuddled by what seemed to be gibberish. By this morning Wikipedia contained a warning label, “This section may be unclear.” According to the article, Cloud Computing gained popularity in 2007 to solve the problem of horizontal scalability. While I have no idea what that means, I did gather one definition (I think). When you back-up your data onto the internet, you’re using Cloud Computing. Okay, good. I’ve got that part.
Then I moved on to BusinessWeek. The sub-title of the article I found is, “A short primer on how the technology works.” I thought surely I’d learn something here. After all, it’s BUSINESS Week, not Geek Week. Well, more or less, the article said, “Cloud Computing is just like grid computing except it’s not centralized and therefore more powerful.” But I always thought grid computing had no centralized requirement in the first place. In fact, I thought that was a key part of it – your computer could be ANYWHERE but still be on the grid. I think that’s correct. In other words, the BusinessWeek reporter didn’t know what it is either.
Finally, I moved on to InfoWorld. This article promised to tell me “What cloud computing really means.” The writer also said, “InfoWorld talked to dozens of vendors, analysts, and IT customers to tease out the various components of cloud computing.” I was thinking "this is not a good sign. I'll get a lot of obfuscation and cloudiness". But in fact I did learn something here. While I didn’t exactly learn what Cloud Computing really is, I did find a list of seven things that are grouped into it.
1) SaaS – I thought software as a service (SaaS) was the follow-on the application service providers (ASP’s). Apparently SaaS is just a type of Cloud Computing.
2) Utility Computing: This starts with the internet backup concept we mentioned earlier, and seems to include adding servers and memory as you need them. So I guess it’s virtual virtualization.
3) Web Services in the Cloud: More or less, this sounds like it involves being able to grab little applets like Google maps without installing them on your own machines. You know, I can actually understand that. I also thought you don’t need to add the word “cloud” to that phrase. It’s sort of implied in web services in the first place.
4) Platform as a Service: This seems to be a combination of SaaS and Web Services. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but perhaps that’s why it was buried in the middle of the list.
5) MSP (or Managed Services Providers): If SaaS delivers business applications, MSP deliveries utilities like virus scanning or spam filtering. I believe I actually understand this part too. It’s not new, but it’s definitely understandable.
6) Service Commerce Platforms: Apparently this is a hybrid of SaaS and MSP. That’s as far as I got. I can’t event pretend to understand this one.
7) Internet Integration: Well, they got me on this one. I thought the whole concept of cloud computing was that it rides on the internet.
The best part of the InfoWorld article was the user contributed comments that follow it. Most of them are pretty much unintelligible, but my favorite was posted by someone named “jimlo.” He said it perfectly, but in a very respectful way: ”This just sounds like someone is clouding the name space. Very unintuitive.” God bless you, jimlo.
So there you have it, the latest and greatest in technology today. These names and acronyms come out as fast as we can define them, but we’ll do our best to keep you apprised. It’s our job.
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