Last night I attended and advisory board meeting for a local VC. About a dozen or so very smart people met around a polished table on Sand Hill Road, ate catered food from Chevy’s, and talked about the future of cloud computing.
The only problem is that we don’t really know what cloud computing is, since every one and their mother is rebranding to be a part of cloud computing. There were basically two camps that emerged in the discussion.
The first, which we’ll call the promiscuously cloud minded, (aka “marketing”) believe that anything with a SOAP API is a part of the cloud, and enthusiastically embrace the blurring of ASP/SaaS with cloud computing by including all of SalesForce, for example, as a part of cloud computing. On this slippery slope, the next logical step (when wearing a marketing hat) is that anything connected to the Internet is cloud computing, making it an even more meaningless term.
The second camp, know generally as “the guys who are right” believes that cloud computing is nothing more than a modification in the billing and provisioning software that web hosting companies have offered for years. We basically bill by the hour for various modern incarnations of HP’s Computon concept, or by ECU or whatever, and we make provisioning into a point and click operation using VMware, Citrix, KVM, cPanel, Virtuozzo, Parallels, or some other toolset. This isn’t different from what we were doing at Exodus Communications 10 years ago; it’s just easier because the supporting technologies are more developed.
It is a mistake to confuse application services hosted on top of cloud infrastructure with the cloud infrastructure itself. We all love the idea of build-your-own point-and-click apps running on cloud computing infrastructure, but they need to be called something besides cloud computing. It pisses me off to see articles like this, where some policy wonk says there are “huge challenges” as cloud computing becomes more popular, because lawmakers will need to think about who owns the data in the cloud. The esteemed people who make our byzantine and conflicting laws need to understand that cloud computing has been happening ever since the first web host came online (in about 1995 when Hotmail asked the Exodus founders to put their servers in a telco environment because it took too long to provision T1s to match growth in free email…)
Honestly, I’m not rambling here. If cloud computing is the same as it ever was, we avoid the need for even more legislation to cover “new” cloud computing. If cloud computing is something new and disruptive, we are in for another round of unhelpful privacy laws that will ultimately stifle cloud innovation, at least for clouds in the US. In any case, I’ll be that our lawmakers ignore the most important legal issue for cloud computing, which is the fact that the supreme court long ago ruled that our 4th amendment protection against unreasonable search was void if our data was hosted by a 3rd party, be it cloud computing or not. This would be really destructive to consumer focused cloud-resident apps, if only consumers who aren’t EFF members paid attention to it
So that’s why you should care whether some marketing guy rebrands his online tire selling web site as cloud computing, and why we need to learn to think of infrastructure, apps, and data as separate entities. Mixing them into a big cloud only makes life hard for us all!
Today, I’m going to write about an equation. I’ll try to make it easy to follow, but it’s still stats and graphs. Stay tuned and I’m convinced it will be worth your while, because in my opinion, it’s the most important equation in cloud computing. It’s what drives your market, your customers, and your burn rate.
