Christofer Hoff's Blog

This love affair with abusing the amorphous thing called "THE Cloud" is rapidly approaching meteoric levels of asininity.

In an absolute fit of angst I make the following comments:

1. There is no singularity that can be described as "THE Cloud." There are many clouds, they're not federated, they don't natively interoperate at the application layer and they're all mostly proprietary in their platform and operation. They're also not all "public" and most don't exchange data in any form. The notion that we're all running out to put our content and apps in some common repository on someone else's infrastructure (or will) is bullshit. Can we stop selling this lemon already?
   
   Yay! More people have realized that outsourcing operations and reducing both OpEx and CapEx by using shared infrastructure makes sense. They also seem to have just discovered it has some real thorny issues, too. Welcome to the 90's. Bully!
   
   Just like there are many types of real billowing humid masses (cumulonimbus, fibratus, undulatus, etc.) there are many instantiations of resource-based computing models that float about in use today -- mobile.me, SalesForce.com, Clean Pipes from ISP's, Google/Google Apps, Amazon EC2, WebEx -- all "cloud" services. The only thing they have in common is they speak a dialect called IP...
   
   
2. The current fad of butchering the term "Cloud Computing" to bring sexy back to the *aaS (anything as a service) model is embarrassing. More embarrassing is the fact that I agree with Larry Ellison wherein he stated:
   
   "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
   
   A-Freaking-Men.
   
   
3. It ain't new, folks. Suggesting that this is a never-before-seen paradigm that we've not faced prior and requires "new" thinking as to privacy, trust models, security as a service layer and service levels mocks the fact that the *aaS model is something we've been grappling with for years and haven't answered. See #2. I mean really. I've personally been directly involved with cloud-models since the early 90's. Besides the fact that it's become (again) an economically attractive and technologically viable option doesn't make it new, it makes it convenient and marketable.
   
   
4. Infrastructure Gorillas are clouding the issue by suggesting thier technology represents THE virtual datacenter OS. Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Cisco. They all say the same thing using different words. Each of them claiming ownership as the platform/OS upon which "THE cloud" will operate. Not one of them have a consistent model of securing their own vDCOS, so don't start on how we're going to secure "IT."
   
   (Ed: In fairness just so nobody feels left out, I should also add that the IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)/integrator gorillas such as IBM and HP are also in the mix -- each with their own flavor of service differentiation sprinkled on top.)

If you thought virtualization and its attendant buzzwords, issues and spin were egregious, this billowy mass of marketing hysteria is enough to make me...blog ;)

C'mon, people. Don't give into the generalist hype. Cloud computing is real. "THE Cloud?" Not so much.