Cloud computing - definitive thoughts on the coming and go of "cloud"

 Economy of scale: Shared Servies

Business world has leverage shared services to gain efficiency and cut costs for many years. To an enterprise, the benefits is magnified due to "economy of scale". IT organization follows the same evolution path over the past 20 years. In the past 3-5 years, a new idiom is minted to describe this trend, cloud computing. When an enterprise has a centralized, managed application platform, it is called PaaS, aka, private platform cloud.

As technology evolves, such as visualization and engineered system become mature, small and median firms can capture such benefits only seen by enterprise afore. They achieve this through 3rd party "cloud" provider. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. It is called public cloud.

So we can view cloud computing as a shared computing services that is managed centrally independent from development or end user. Various LOB of an enterprise share the "private" cloud for their IT needs, while group of independent companies share the "public" cloud for pooled efficiency.

The art of Computer Engineering 

Computing engineering is human intensive, for now at least. Thus, human skills and expertise with technology is critical for IT to success. Some expertise, such as enterprise architecture, experiences and in-depth know-how can only be acquired over years. Thus, we are facing a talent shortage where IT is concerned. Yes, yes, there are millions of "software engineering" or "IT professionals", but not everyone are created equal in the technology world, especially IT.

Because of the following reasons, a shared services model is far superior to discrete or proprietary IT services.

  a) human intensive IT.
  b) expertise and in-depth knowledge are results of years of experiences,


Technology Advances behind "Cloud computing"
As IT is more and more becoming a definitive factor critical to the business success or failure, every traditional or new part of the economy started enhance their information capabilities. This IT boom created sprawling data center where cost and power consumption is out of control as portfolio expanding. We heard a few years ago complaints about IT power costs, cooling costs, under-utilized servers.

Two technology advances come to the rescue. 1st, visualization software pioneered by VMWare. This technology make it possible to isolate co-located applications.  2nd, parallel architecture created ever powerful servers that can consolidate cheap, less powerful blades by hundreds. Together, these two technologies make it all possible to create a "shared services" platform, aka, cloud computing.


Is this just another term?
Cloud computing is more than Shared Services. Before technology advances, a shared services is truly just a "service", as LOB or customer often buy computing by servers, and thus expecting that their servers NOT "polluted" by other LOB's applications.

Now cloud computing can truly follow a utility model. Business only need to pay the computation power and  support they need. No prohibitive up-front costs for anyone anymore, except perhaps the "seed" capital investment by the cloud provider.

Fast provisioning, automation, managed/monitored platform, low TCO, pay as you go, etc are some of the benefits to the business. In this sense, cloud computing is not just a term, but a paradigm change for IT.