Cloudy with a Chance of Dominance

In today’s world, we are constantly defining and redefining concepts and technologies such as TV, the web, and social interactions. One of the things that struck me after last week’s class was how a company can become very successful by entering into the “conversation” of definitions early on. We see this very clearly in the case of Google. The company took an emerging concept/technology (the search engine), and completely reworked it to provide users with a superior means with which to search the web for data and information. The company’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

At the moment, we see this conflict over definition and redefinition playing out with cloud computing. Everyone wants to be in the cloud, have a cloud, and use the cloud. But what IS the cloud, exactly? NIST has defined the cloud as a “pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” However, NIST’s is not the only definition floating around out there, and there are a lot of companies that are trying very hard to make sure that THEIR version of the cloud is what becomes the ultimate standard.

I worked for VMware over the summer on a cloud computing project, and this idea of definition was very pressing. The way VMware views the cloud, there will be private and public clouds, with different variations on levels of service for both options. Bringing this back to where I started this post, we’re in a pretty exciting time right now, similar to the early days of search engine providers all over the place. There are any number of providers that are offering services ranging from applications to storage solutions. In the future, we may see the development of a universal set of open standards that everyone agrees on… or we might see one company/approach become dominant… or something else entirely. In a year or two, there might be another Google out there, providing us with all our cloud computing needs. In all likelihood, such a company will be one that is currently actively engaged in the conversation about the cloud, and what its definition might be.