Cloud Computing at Interop New York 2012
A pint of servers, please.
Our online lives are full of metaphor. Our files live in folders and trashcans. Our inboxes are full of messages we’re carbon copied on. Even the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard was designed to make mechanical typewriters jam less often, rather than for typing efficiency.
Metaphors help us to understand and adopt new things. They’re a bridge between the familiar and the strange.
The power of familiarity…
If you doubt the power of familiar units of measure, just look at the British Pint. For centuries, Britons have ordered their pints of beer.
Most people who understand math know the metric system is easy to use: it’s based on logical multiples of ten. Units are interchangeable between size, temperature, volume, and weight: a cubic centimetre of water at zero degrees celcius, which is a hundred millilitres, weighs one gram.
Yet so attached are they to the pint that the European Union made a special provision to allow the pint as a unit of measure. America has so far avoided the metric system, making it the only country not to adopt the system other than Burma and Liberia.
In America, we cling to our inches, miles, and degrees Fahrenheit because we know how to work with them: if I tell you it’s 32 Celsius outside, do you need a jacket?
We have this familiar metaphor problem in cloud computing. As we move towards on-demand architectures, we’re dragging a familiar unit of measure into the clouds at our peril: the Virtual Machine.
Virtual machines make it easy to understand the cloud. Companies understand physical hardware, so it’s an easy mental leap to say, “let’s rent a machine for an hour.” Unfortunately, this belies the true promise of cloud computing.
Look at Amazon Web Services’ offering. Only one of its services -- the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2 -- involves virtual machines. There are a dozen others, including S3 (large object storage), SimpleDB (key-value storage), Simplehadoop (parallel Mapreduce data crunching), SimpleMQ (a message queue bus), and others.
Yet when most IT professionals compare cloud offerings, we look at only the core of storage, memory, CPU, and network capacity. We pay little attention to the surrounding ecosystem of services that are also part of the offering.
This is bad for our nascent cloud industry. The promise of cloud computing comes not from timesharing our machines, but from building new, elastic, agile applications out of components. Clouds aren’t about virtual computers -- they’re about new kinds of applications, built atop massive services simply connected to one another.
It’s also bad for private clouds. The clouds-are-virtual-machines definition makes CIOs think they’ve adopted cloud computing once their users can self-provision machines. They stop short of building the rest of the ecosystem -- key-value storage, PaaS platforms, RESTful payment and authentication systems, and so on -- that might really transform their IT and change how developers build applications.
So while much of cloud computing’s success today comes from the simple metaphors we’ve used to describe it, we have to avoid being trapped by those metaphors. EC2 is not AWS; clouds are not machines. It’s the surrounding ecosystem that matters, and we ignore it at our peril.
This is part of the philosophy we apply to the Enterprise Cloud Summit and Cloud Computing conference track agendas. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype around clouds. But it’s just as easily to dismiss the fundamental changes on the horizon. Clouds are about building new applications out of huge, elastic components connected simply to one another in SOA-like design patterns. Virtual machines are only the beginning.
See you at Interop New York.
Alistair Croll
Principal Analyst
BitCurrent
Hear from other Interop New York Cloud Computing speakers:
Jason Read, Founder, CloudHarmony - Cloud Performance Benchmark Research
Randy Bias, CEO and Founder, CloudScaling - The impact of OpenStack on the cloud computing ecosystem
John Barnes CTO, ModelMetrics - ModelMetrics releases 1st mobile cloud platform for the enterprise
