Twitter can on occasion prove useful. My tweeps this morning shared an excellent post by Phil Wainewright of ZDNet on Cloud Computing and some misconceptions that still exist years after we’ve been talking about and implementing clouds titled “Cloud Computing: do you have a clue?”. I agree with a lot of what Phil writes and have written about some of this here. Cloud computing isn’t about the infrastructure, it’s about services and consumption.
Phil rightly points out that cloud applications and application transformation is largely ignored by vendors and the press when talking about cloud. I think that his statement that “the whole point [of the cloud architecture symbol] was that you didn’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, because it was abstracted within the service” really captures what we should be trying to create with services designed to be delivered via the cloud.
Too often we still refer to the underlying components as if somehow that’s what the cloud is, a collection of things ingeniously integrated. We need to move up the stack when thinking about cloud, it’s about services and how they are delivered without concern for where they are delivered from, what infrastructure they are delivered off of, etc. The concern should be about price, reliability, security, compliance, etc. Those are concerns that directly impact the value of the service to the business, isn’t that what we should be focusing on?