Cloud 101 – Is the Cloud a Commodity?
Posted by brennels on February 16, 2010
I posed this question to my friends on Twitter and was surprised and the variation of answers I received. The first thought was that it already is and will continue to be but then there were some additional comments that got us thinking and expanded on that original statement. The next comment was the Cloud could be a commodity but would depend on vendors’ adherence to open interoperability standards, which I agree. However, if the past is any prediction to the future the hardware vendors will once again get it wrong by trying to force the consumer to adopt to their proprietary platforms versus an independent and hardware agnostic solutions that would allow workloads and compute power to be transferred across data centers in real-time seamlessly without interruption. Besides why do you care where your workload is running from as long as it is secure and accessible? It was a t this point where I realized that the “Cloud” itself isn’t the commodity but it is the compute power as noted by RoudyBob in our discussion. And this is what the commodity is, which will be the ability to transfer, utilize and purchase cloud compute power like a utility.
The discussion when on so long that I decided that maybe we should have our own discussion forum so I created a Facebook fanpage “Cloud Recovery – Recovery as a Service” where we could continue the discussion. Peterl on twitter then wrote a pretty lengthy blog post with more in depth insight which was linked on the Cloud Recovery fanpage and can be read on PLaudenslager’s blog
For the most part we were all pretty much in agreement but there were many different opinions of how the Cloud would arrive as being a commodity. I think it has yet to shake out for the various comments listed above but someday and maybe soon the Cloud could very well be a traded and exchanged commodity.
