10 Predictions About Cloud Computing

Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

by James Watson,

• Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

  by Dilip Krishnan,

  • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

    by James Watson,

    • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

      by Dilip Krishnan,

      • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

        by James Watson,

    • My co-worker Bob has some thoughts on this too!

      by Bill Digman,

  • Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

    by James Watson,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I predict that within the next few years, the hype around cloud computing will begin to fade and that a lot of these predictions (if not all) will seem very poor in hindsight. Cloud computing is surely an important but it seems more incremental than revolutionary to me.

    Like Reply

    Back to top

  • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

    by Dilip Krishnan,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I don't know if these predictions will seem poor or not in the future, but he makes good points based on what we know now. On the other hand I do think that many analysts are beginning to feel that cloud computing has matured enough that changes are beginning to feel incremental.

    Like Reply

    Back to top

  • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

    by James Watson,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I don't know if these predictions will seem poor or not in the future, but he makes good points based on what we know now.

    
    
    I'm not so sure. First of all, there aren't really any time frames. We can all make predictions that could eventually come true. It's predicting when that's the trick.
    
    I get why PaaS is appealing to vendors (lock-in) but it's not terribly exiting for customers (lock-in). We tend to forget in technology is that people have to want what is being sold. PaaS only makes sense to the customer if it's standardized (of course a lot of IT customers are naive) but only proprietary PaaS is really compelling for the vendor. I find it unlikely that we will see one approach dominate the other. Additionally, PaaS requires that vendors retrofit existing applications. This is a pretty expensive thing to take for something that has little to no value to the customer.
    
    The big problem with cloud computing as an industry is that if you have something where you can opaquely trade computing resources (as predicted) that means that none of the cloud providers have any real advantage over each other. They are just selling commodities. Not a really compelling business model. Sure you can talk about economies of scale but even this is questionable. Why is it cheaper per computer to run 10,000 computers than to run 1,000? The only economy of scale is getting full utilization which becomes harder the more computing power you have. It's not like 2 computers produce less heat or use less energy than one. And the more you pack computers into a space the harder it is to keep them cool, effectively limiting computer density. Even if big data centers provide efficiencies, they put more eggs in single basket so that disasters (natural or not) are more devastating. If a market environment, the smaller players may actually be more efficient. In an environment where computing time can be sold on markets, what's the barrier to entry?
    
    Many of these predictions are mostly just lifted from the history of other industries or based on extremely short history of cloud computing. As the disclaimer goes: past performance is not an indication of future results.

    Like Reply

    Back to top

  • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

    by Dilip Krishnan,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    We can all make predictions that could eventually come true. It's predicting when that's the trick.

    :D
    
    

    They are just selling commodities. Not a really compelling business model. Sure you can talk about economies of scale but even this is questionable.

    
    Thats not the only thing, it serves needs that are not limited to that... for example its speed to market, scaling on demand, plus it arbitrages the added administrative/fixed costs. How efficiently providers deliver this solution is what sets them apart. In my opinion predictions, atleast in this case, are really an attempt to bring out these issues to the front.

    Like Reply

    Back to top

  • Re: Ever notice that people see different things in clouds?

    by James Watson,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    The link James Urquhart is appreciated. I especially like this: to Data is not Electricity.
    
    Actually, I think that perhaps the cloud computing model is better compared to an industry with huge capital costs where profitability depends on utilizing those resources. For example, it would have some parallels with the airline industry. In such industries, the biggest players don't always win. For example Southwest pummels the big-boys, not the other way around. Another similarity is that costs and therefore prices are highly dependent on energy costs and struggle to pass on such costs to customers. This is why companies are vying to place data centers near the cool breezes and cheap hydro-power of Niagara Falls instead of in the geologically unstable fire-trap California.

    Like Reply

    Back to top

  • My co-worker Bob has some thoughts on this too!

    by Bill Digman,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Bob's response to "Thinking Out Cloud's Predictions".  Geva Perry is
    an optimistic fellow and he came out with a list of predictions that
    has been picked up at InfoQ (Thinking Out Cloud predictions).
    
    Bob points out: "Predictions with out time-lines are fairly useless.
    Cars will drive themselves. They will all be electric and many people
    will own flying cars. As long as I never put a date on it, of course
    it will very likely come true in the distant future."
    
    He goes on to state: "No IaaS providers keep adding PaaS support and
    the lines between IaaS and PaaS are fairly blurry. Plus you have all
    of the not so great PaaS providers, who are not much more than window
    dressing on AWS, over promising what equates to mostly to vaporware.
    ... IT shops are not jumping on the public cloud quite yet. There is
    some trepidation there. Private clouds (on premises and off) and
    hybrid clouds are going to see a lot more growth than pure public
    plays. Public does not rule, and it will not rule for a while.
    I could disagree about more, but I'll leave it for another day."
    Thinking
    Out Cloud: Predictions
    
    Thinking
    Out Cloud: Predictions, Bob's response.

    Like Reply

    Back to top