Chris Read

I found a link to Above the Clouds, a paper on Cloud Computing recently published by a quartet of UC Berkeley RAD Lab professors. I’ve been quite disappointed with publications on the subject of the latest buzzword taking the world by storm right now, so I was not expecting much when I first clicked on the link. The thing is, as I started reading through the Executive Summary it all sounded very familiar. The outline the give in the summary follows the same outline as a talk I gave in November last year at the ThoughtWorks London office for the London Java Community.

The only criticism I have is that they don’t put enough emphasis on one of my key reasons for why it’s suddenly taken off. Cloud computing is not a new idea – it’s an extension of the Utility Computing that John McCarthy talked about in 1961. Although they only make a passing remark in section 3, I think one of the most important reasons it’s taken off is that the services Amazon provide were the first that were not a “solution looking for a problem”. Earlier offerings by the likes of Sun, HP and Intel all created a solution that they tried to sell to clients. The problem was that there were remarkably few problems that their solutions solved. Amazon simply exposed services that they were using internally already. That’s not to say the other reasons they give are not valid, I totally agree with them. I think they just missed a good point.

One of the topics I only glanced over is covered cover quite well in section 6 – Cloud Computing Economics. They provide some interesting example cost calculations. Although the numbers are obviously US centric, they do provide a nice way for a company to approach making the old “build vs buy” comparison.

In summary, I highly recommend this paper for anyone who wants to get the head around what this Cloud stuff is all about and what they need to do to prepare for it.