Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Cloud Computing Value Propositions

To cut through all the hype around cloud computing, I think you need to focus on what value is ultimately delivered to the developer who builds his or her systems on "Cloud infrastructures." I say the developer here rather than the end user because the end user really cares more about their applications and services, not how those services are implemented.

In a recent paper published by researchers from the RADLab at UC Berkeley, Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing three new hardware aspects of Cloud Computing are suggested:

  1. The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand

  2. The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users.

  3. The ability to pay for use of computer resources as needed,


But these are all just variants of "capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operating costs (OPEX) conversion." And in other contexts, it goes by the slightly jaundiced term outsourcing. We've been doing this for years in IT, but the refined techniques developed by Amazon, Google, and others has made finer grain outsourcing practical.

While these benefits are valuable and lower the barrier to entry for many startups and small organizations, it shares the same pitfalls of outsourced manufacturing or design.

I believe there is more value to Computing Computing than just new way to outsource. Cloud Computing delivers a far more unique value of enabling business agility.

Those who have benefited from Cloud Computing, like Google and Salesforce.com have done so because their developers have a much richer platform to work with than is traditional. They don't need to configure operating systems or databases, they don't need to port new packages to their environment and painfully identify conflicting interdependencies. Instead, they have a relatively comprehensive platform to develop to, which provides distributed data store, data mining, load balancing, etc. without any development or configuration on their part.

It is this rich platform, which spans computing, storage, and communications, that allows Google to rapidly respond to business changes and market sentiment, and run more agilely than their competitors.

The original EC2/S3 offering effectively delivered on the outsourcing business value, but what has made Amazon Web Services compelling today is the rich platform that an AWS developer has at their disposal: load balancing from Right Scale, the Hadoop infrastructure from Cloudera, Amazon's content distribution network, etc. So, I believe that a real challenge to the success of Cloud Computoing is determining the characteristics of a "platform", that provides the greatest value for Cloud Computing developers. Too high a level of abstraction, e.g., Force.com narrows the application range.

Too low a level, and you are just outsourcing your IT hardware.

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