As Alistair pointed out recently, interest in cloud computing is skyrocketing. All of IT seems to be reframing the industry around the term “cloud computing.” Google’s cloud computing group is a veritable inbox-denial-of-service-machine, and offers more philosophy than practical grist for those of us in the trenches engineering or operating applications in the wol. Reading the threads, I was reminded of this classic exchange between Hamlet and Polonius:

Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that ’s almost in shape of a camel?
Pol. By the mass, and ’t is like a camel, indeed.
Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel.
Pol. It is backed like a weasel.
Ham. Or like a whale?
Pol. Very like a whale.

Companies are scrambling to rebrand their services as cloud based, many of them without substantially changing their offerings. In an intensely speculative industry, overpopulated with caffeine riddled ADD sufferers (it takes one to know one), it is easy to get swept away with the new semantics. But something real is driving the use of the amorphous term, and as this blog has pointed out we have witnessed a seismic transition refocusing the IT industry on a new style of utility computing.

While geologically the transition to utility computing is going to happen in a flash, we are realistically looking at 5-10 years until we can really be confident in the specifics of how this shift in the economics of computing will affect the market. For example we have speculated at Bitcurrent that there may be a diversity of “verticalized” clouds, each architected and optimized for specific applications.

For those who have the time, I highly recommend dabbling with AppEngine, AWS or services layered on top of AWS such as Elastra, Heroku and Rightscale. These skills will be in high demand. For everyone else, gainfully employed or otherwise productive, don’t worry too much about being left behind: we are still in the early stages of the evolution of cloud computing and you’re better off learning from the (many) hard lessons of the early adopters. Traditional hosting is incredibly cheap and well understood and it is easier to find developers who don’t know how to code for the cloud.

The very nature of cloud computing permits that the longer you wait, the more accessible and less expensive it will be to get your head in the clouds.