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What is the state of cloud computing?


By Robert Mullins
May 15, 2008 — 
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879, but it took about 30 years for an electric utility industry to form and deliver what today one might call electricity “in the cloud.” Guy Creese believes history will repeat itself with cloud computing—and it might take another three decades.

“I would say if you end up … dismissing cloud computing out of hand, you’re making a mistake,” said Creese, an analyst at Burton Group.

Besides the entrance of large players such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and, more recently, a preview release of Google’s App Engine, some cloud computing initiatives used last month’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco as a launching pad.

Cloud computing makes sense for the same reasons it made sense for homes and businesses to get electricity from a utility in the early 20th century, as opposed to having people operate their own generators: It’s cheaper, less complicated and allows a company to concentrate on its core business.

“With cloud computing, you have the freedom not to have to run a data center, because you just pay as you go,” said Essy Nickolova, a marketing vice president at 3Tera, which exhibited its Cloudware architecture at the Web 2.0 Expo, under the banner “Cloud Computing Without Compromise.”

Although not a cloud provider like Amazon, Cloudware is based on 3Tera’s AppLogic grid computing operating system. Four of the main cloud providers identified in a March Forrester Research report use 3Tera architecture to set up applications to run in the cloud.

Other cloud providers first help clients build a software application and then run it for them in the cloud.

Bungee jumps in
Bungee Labs introduced its Bungee Connect development platform at the Web 2.0 Expo along with its hosting service. Applications can be hosted in one of two Bungee data centers or on Amazon’s EC2 service, access to which Bungee resells. Moreover, clients can host Bungee-developed applications in their own data centers if they’re not yet ready to reach for the clouds.

Although the merits of cloud computing are widely understood, reservations remain. In the March Forrester report, “Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?” analyst James Staten raised several caveats:

First, service-level agreements from cloud computing providers “are mostly nonexistent,” he wrote, so enterprises lack the assurance that computing capacity will be there when they need it. But startups seeking to outsource their computing don’t share that concern.

What’s more, though major players such as Akami, Amazon and Salesforce.com are entering cloud computing, more major vendors must come forward for enterprises to gain confidence in the market. Yet, Google is venturing in with its App Engine, and Microsoft’s Mesh for the consumer is regarded as a cloud computing play.

Finally, few enterprise references exist from cloud providers to give prospective users confidence in the service, Staten noted.

Until cloud computing becomes more widely available and accepted, Staten added, enterprises are taking baby steps with cloud R&D projects, non-critical business applications or Web-based collaboration services.

Burton Group’s Creese agrees that the evolution has not reached the tipping point, when adoption would accelerate quickly. He asked, “How does an enterprise perform quality assurance or maintain documentation for an application someone else hosts? How does a company switch from one cloud computing provider to another? What happens to their data stored with the previous provider?”

Those questions need to be addressed, but Creese believes the answer to the more fundamental question should drive all other decisions—the one businesspeople posed a century ago—“Why are we devoting all this time, money, effort and people to create electricity for us when we could just plug into this grid?”


Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing


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