Above The Cloud

It occurred to me that I had not really defined the concept of "cloud" although many of you already understand the meaning behind the term. Still, it makes sense that I spend a small amount of time defining what it means to me, and therefore, how it will impact the content of this blog.

Wikipedia defines ‘cloud’ as follows.

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals

You know I’d always seen the cloud depiction (even used it in some Visio diagrams) but my lazy brain never made the association. Sounds somewhat reasonable now.

So what do we mean when we think of services hosted in the cloud? Well, consider for a minute something old-school like billboards or IRC. Here were theses centralized services that offered something, free or otherwise, that provided value to its consumers. We liked to chat to other people, IRC facilitated this via a common protocol. We used "rich" clients (mIRC?) to make the experience even more enjoyable, simpler, and more automated.

Would we consider IRC to be a cloud offering? Its not really replacing any service locally (except standing up and talking to your neighbor), but that seems to be a common concept around cloud – moving the work from our desktops/servers onto the Internet in a way that we now no longer hold any responsibility over maintaining the app or its infrastructure needs.

Now consider something like Office Communicator. My employer has a communicator server so that we can all message each other. But I’ve been using MSN since before I can remember to achieve the same thing. How does this fit into our definition of cloud based services?

The more I think about it, the more examples I come up with. Email is a classic. My organization has an Exchange server, but I’ve had a Hotmail account since the dawn of time. More recently, we store our contacts in Facebook, our professional contacts in LinkedIn, and our calendars in Google.

Could it be that this is in fact nothing new? Could the cloud terminology perhaps be just hype? I decided to delve into some other people’s opinions, and here’s what I discovered.

• Thorsten has a nice definition of some cloud terminology here
• This article from the Cloud Computing Journal contains the opinions of some experts in the field on the terminology
• This Cloud Computing Primer from IT World contains some nice analogies around torrents

Finding definitions about ‘cloud computing’ is easy, but often relates to scalable infrastructure: something developers aren’t always very interested in.

So the question again is: what is this blog all about? I guess I could abuse the generality of the definition of ‘cloud’ to incorporate anything Internet related, but I really don’t want to do that. Instead, I want to focus on how cloud based applications are/will replace/change the way we do things today. For example I recently posted about Mesh. I see Live Mesh as being something that will change the way we fundamentally work with computers/phones, so it definitely deserves a mention. And cloud computing topics such as AWS, Azure, and GoGrid are always going to receive a special focus, of that I am sure.

Beyond that, I am open to suggestions. If you find I am straying too far, please let me know. If I am becoming to focused (I’ve got my blinkers on), again, let me know.