Cloud Computing circa 2006

The newbies

In the beginning, there are data centers run by Amazon who need the capacity to handle the rush of Cyber Monday. Google, Salesforce.com, Netflix, and Facebook too are busy tuning their data centers to their own needs.

Dropbox, who will build on Amazon's Cloud infrastructure, is but a glimmer in the founder's eye and won't get started until 2007

The incumbents

VMWare, Cisco, and EMC are busy minding their enterprise business. Rackspace too focuses on providing fanatical support to enterprise users.

Blame it on EC2

Then, somebody at Amazon come to the idea that maybe it would be nice to monetize the "excess" data center capacity for most of the year outside of the Cyber Monday rush. So, the experiment, aka beta, of renting out computing resources from existing data center through services like EC2 and S3 were born.

The mad scramble for Cloud Computing thus have begun.

Cloud Computing Ecosystem - Follow the Money

For those who are studying Cloud Computing as an economic system, a more meaningful stratification is probably through its value chain. In particular, I parse them into four (4) categories: Hardware, Software (Operating Systems), Operations, and Services.

Hardware: Admittedly a major allure of Cloud Computing is to render hardware a secondary consideration as commodities. On the other hand, as its fundamental building block, there is no Cloud Computing without hardware. And, given the relative youth of Cloud Computing as an industry, it is hubris to say that hardware is no longer matters. As a matter of a fact, this is one of the competitive advantages if you know what you are doing.

An example of the hardware player is EMC who provides enterprise-class storage solutions.

Software (Operating Systems): I often get asked what is meant by Cloud OS, is it like Windows or Linux? If you think of a Cloud Computing data center as a macro-computer – a warehouse-size computer with a lot of computing, storage, and network/communication capabilities – the ability to orchestrate this macro-computer is indeed an OS (operating system).

An example of the software player is VMWare who provides virtualization software which is a key aspect of multiplexing using Cloud Computing.

Operation: Tedious it may seem, but feeding and caring of the Cloud Computing data centers is as much of an art as it is science. This is an area of tremendous innovation as different operators are competing on different dimensions to meet Cloud consumers's myriad needs.

Amazon is the undisputed operator today. Also worth watching would be Rackspace who has argued that its focus is to provide on-going operator know-how.

Services: this is probably the most visible manifestation of Cloud Computing. From the early success of Salesforce.com to the many Cloud firms that Oracle is snapping up, these are the end-user facing public-face of this eco-systems.

Beyond Salesforce.com, both Netflix and Dropbox are good example of companies that are "pure" Cloud player where they could not exist without the underlying Cloud operator, software, and hardware.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS be Gone - Cloud Computing at Cocktail Parties

Given my current focus on Cloud Computing, I often get asked to give a 15 second description of Cloud Computing. This got me thinking, why is Cloud Computing so confusing to many a intelligent persons lay and pros alike?

Are the terms IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service) familiar? If you are reading this, I suspect that you have an inkling and may even have a specific take on this Cloud Computing stack. But, how useful are the descriptors IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS if you are not building/selling one of these XaaS?

This is what I say to people over cocktails on Cloud Computing. It is a way to do IT at lower cost with the same or better features. It is sort of like when PC unlocks computing to the mere business analysts or internet unlocks electronic communication to mom and dad. It is a big deal precisely because it "could" be pervasive.

Chin-Chin!