Mike Kavis has written a great post following the Forrester EA forum, suggesting that cloud computing faces the risk of heading down the same road of death by over-definition recently run by SOA. I couldn’t agree more with what he says – especially his lessons for getting the pitch right. Still, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep about cloud computing going away any time soon.
As a concept (even one which is misunderstood and misrepresented woefully), cloud computing is orders of magnitude simpler to explain than SOA ever was. SOA is the only industry buzz-word that I’ve ended up buying books about just to get my head around the general concept (that may say more about me than SOA mind).
Cloud computing, I feel has much more of a self-fulfilling dynamic about it than SOA could have had. The economics of it are mind-blowingly simple – even if a solution ends up more expensive than in-house, it is at least cost-transparent. The benefits to the business are clear and are very often then things that in-house IT has been failing to deliver for years (think agility and effective communication of costs in particular).
Ultimately, while some of the FUD is important, it’s in the process of being answered. Most of the issues with cloud computing have been solved somewhere already. What we’re going to see (sorry, are seeing!) now is the emergence of services able to tick many boxes simultaneously. These services will take off, FUD or no FUD.
Five years from now, we may well all have forgotten the phrase ‘cloud computing’ but it will be there one way or another, and the enterprise IT department and the data-centre will have been changed forever regardless.
[...] When we ran this post last May, cloud storage was an important topic of discussion. Since then, the blogo-tweet-o-sphere has exploded, with numerous posts per week on the subject, such as this one and this one. [...]
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