In the last several months we have talked to myriad vendor representatives about cloud computing. Some of the people we talked to tried to convince us that there were no significant issues with cloud computing and that it would be the dominant style of computing within the next year.
Part 3 of cloud computing series
Part 2 of cloud computing series
Part 1 of cloud computing series
Our first reaction to these conversations was anger. Then we just laughed. Thankfully, we also had the opportunity to talk to some really bright, straight-forward people such as James Urquhart of Cisco. In large part because of the conversations with folks like Urquhart, we strongly believe in the potential of cloud computing. However, for all of the reasons discussed in the preceding newsletters we think that the phrase cloud computing is no longer useful.
We suggest that one of the goals of cloud computing is the elastic provisioning of computing resources such as networks and servers. A few years ago we called that utility computing. We also suggest that another goal of cloud computing is to drastically lower the cost of IT. Referring back to the previous newsletter, cloud computing has the potential to lower the cost of IT by more than an order of magnitude.
OK, things that sound too good to be true, usually aren’t true. A reasonable IT professional has to be asking “How is cloud computing supposed to accomplish these dramatic goals at some ill-defined time in the future?” To put our response in context, we want to point out that we often analyze WAN services on the 3 ‘abilities. Those are: avail-ability, servic-ability and manag-ability. We suggest that the basis of cloud computing is the 3 ‘ations. Those are virtualiz-ation, autom-ation, and standardiz-ation. Of the three, the one that concerns us the most is standardization. We will definitely come back to that topic in a future newsletter.
So, in an attempt at radical simplification, we suggest renaming cloud computing to be CEEP IT, which stands for Cost Effective Elastic Provisioning of IT resources. CEEP IT Type 1 refers to implementing the 3 ‘ations in your own environment. CEEP IT Type 2 refers to using a service provider that implements the 3 ‘ations. CEEP IT Type 3 refers to a combination of CEEP Types 1 and 2.
We don’t seriously believe this terminology will catch on, which is shame because if it did it would be a lot clearer what is being discussed.
