The Cloud is to Managed Infrastructure as Guitar Hero is to Karaoke…
How many of your friends do you know that would never be caught dead at a karaoke bar belting out 80's hair band tunes and looking like complete tools?
How
many of them are completely unafraid, however, to make complete idiots of themselves and rock out to the
same musical arrangements in front of total strangers because instead of "karaoke" it's
called "Guitar Hero" and runs on an XBox in the living room rather
than the "Tiki Room" on Wednesday nights?
With all the definitions of the Cloud and the vagaries associated with differentiated value propositions of each, folks have begun to use the phrases "jumping the shark" and "Cloud Computing" in the same breath.
For the sake of argument, if we boil down what Cloud Computing means in simpler and more familiar terms and agree to use rPath's definition (from Cloud Computing in Plain English) as an oversimplified example we get:
Virtualization: Where applications are separated from infrastructure
Utility Computing: Server Capacity is accessed across a a grid as a variably priced shared service
SaaS: Applications are available on-demand on a subscription basis
Again, overly-simplified example notwithstanding, what's interesting to me — and the reason for the goofy title and metaphor associated with this post — is that with the popularity of "Cloud" becoming the umbrella terminology for the application of proven concepts (above) which harness technology and approaches we already have, we're basically re-branding a framework of existing capabilities and looking to integrate them better.
…oh, and make a buck, too.
That's not to diminsh the impact and even value of the macro-trends associated with Cloud such as re-perimeterization, outsourcing, taking cost of the business, economies of scale, etc., it's just a much more marketable way of describing them.
The cloud: a cooler version of Internet karaoke…
/Hoff
*Image of Triston McIntyre from ITKnowledgeExchange
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