Steve Hodgkinson
Who ya gonna call when your cloud evaporates?
Are the recent service outages by cloud computing and SaaS providers reason to doubt the future of cloud computing? We think not, but you should plan for occasional dry spells. Google App Engine, Amazon Simple Storage Service and Apple's MobileMe service have all experienced some high-profile service outages in the past few months. Is it safe to rely on the cloud?Cloud needs to grow up
Cloud computing needs to move beyond its roots as a means for the Internet giants to sell some of their excess capacity and become a more mature, geographically redundant and robust computing infrastructure.The popularisation of pay-per-use cloud computing is a recent by-product of the creation of web-scale applications by companies like Amazon and Google. Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) were launched as ways of generating additional return from the company's huge investments in data processing and web services infrastructure required to support its core, low-margin retail business. Salesforce.com and Google's App Engine were launched with similar motivations. Owners of the Internet's 'heavy production' infrastructure have realised that their assets can be, and need to be, sweated harder in an increasingly competitive market. The distribution channel that they have mastered for their core products gives them the opportunity to sell, as a by-product, some of the IT capacity that they use to run their businesses. Notwithstanding Sun Microsystems' Sun Grid Compute Utility, the major IT companies have been slower to see the opportunities in the cloud. They are, after all, making plenty of money selling shovels in the computing gold rush and providing outsourced IT services. Recent announcements, however, confirm that cloud computing is indeed on the major IT vendors' radars.- IBM is expanding its cloud computing capabilities by investing in data centres in the US and Japan - adding to centres in Ireland, China and South Africa. IBM plans to employ 200 full-time researchers and invest more than $100 million in cloud computing over the next three years.
- Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are partnering to create new R&D centres for cloud computing. The companies will set up six 'Cloud Computing Test Beds' to allow enterprises, universities and government entities to improve the software, hardware and management techniques needed to successfully operate cloud computing.
