Parting the Mists of Cloud Computing

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There certainly is a lot of hype around Cloud Computing.  It ranks at the very top of the overused terms thrown around by the marketeers. Do a Google News search and you'll see more than 6,000 unique stories in the past month on cloud computing. However the concept behind the cloud is quite real.  Very simply, it represents the natural evolution of IT infrastructure - towards virtualization.

IT infrastructure is following a course that we have seen many times before in history.  At the dawn of the electrical era a century ago, companies were forced to build and operate their own generating capacity.  Eventually, standardization and technical innovation led to the modern electrical power grid that we depend on today. 

As a consumer of electricity, do I know or even care where the power is generated?  No.  We have virtualized the power grid.  The result is electricity is at once more affordable and accessible to a broader range of consumers.

Forty years ago, the first packet sent over the ARPANET represented the dawn of the networking age.  For most of the next four decades, if I wanted to build a wide area network, I built or leased dedicated lines to build a private network.  Today my network provider offers me a virtual private network, and all its benefits, at a much lower cost point because I share the physical infrastructure with other customers.  This also opens up the benefits of private networks to a larger subscriber base.  

Do I know or care how my traffic is routed?  No.  The wide area network has become virtualized.  And the cloud is a metaphor we commonly use for a virtualized network. Thus it stands to reason that the natural course for IT infrastructure is towards virtualization.  

One of the major trends over the last decade has been the standardization and virtualization of servers, storage, and networking.  This enables the resources to be pooled and shared across multiple applications or users, resulting in greater efficiency and elasticity of the infrastructure. 

And because it is a network that interconnects servers and storage, it is only natural that we use the moniker of cloud to describe these abstracted resource pools.

Today it is possible to build clouds within an organization's internal infrastructure.  We call these private clouds.  It is also now possible to tap into clouds offered by service providers.  We call these public clouds.  And someday, as the technology evolves, and as history has shown us, we won't know or care where the processing is done or the data is stored so long as the service is reliable, secure and affordable.  That is Cloud Computing.

Thus, whether you compare this trend to the evolution of the power grid (grid computing) or to the evolution of the network (cloud computing), the result is the same.  It is the natural evolutionary course for IT infrastructure that will ultimately lower the cost and improve the accessibility of computing.