I think I heard so many times that cloud is a hype that, I decided to write something about it.
There is really a hype there, I know that but, will cloud survive beyond the hype? I clearly believe in so. Let's see why:
Economy will never return to the ol'days
Yes, recession will go away someday (hopefully sooner than later), but things will not be the same again. You'll still be traveling economic and you'll still be struggling with the IT Capex. It is just the way it is. Once you do a cost cut, you'll have to live with it. New things will come, new opportunities, new projects but, reducing the cost efficiency will not be tolerated by management.
Remember the first oil crisis when cars consumed a lot of fuel per kilometer? When the oil price come up, car manufacturers struggled to lower the consumption of their engines. But what happened when the oil price lowered? Did cars manufacturers stopped improving the engines efficiency? No, they still kept working on efficiency.
And the same happens to IT Capex. Once you get more efficient you'll not be allowed to get back. Even when the crisis is over. So, get used to that and embrace this brave new world.
Easy of use
I used to drive manual gears cars. I said it was better than automatic because I could control better the car performance. After having my first automatic, I changed my mind. Yes, manual gives you more control but, except for a very few situations, you just want your car to go from point A to B as easy as possible.
Thats, exactly what happens in cloud. One can want to do it the old way, assembling hardware, passing cables, having the joy of loading DVDs to install and configure the OS but, for most of the times, you just want the machine up and running the fastest and easiest way.
And, to do it manually for 10+ servers? Do you still want to do it on the good old way? Yes, we are all lazy guys and automation is our salvation! And, with templates and drag'n'drop we can just create as many servers as we want with a few clicks. Pretty neat!
Release your mind
I used to code in assembly for the x86 in the old days. Memory, variables were quite scarce resources.
One have to take care of so many thinks on the low level that drained our energies completely to do more complex stuff. It took so much time and work to code a simple thinks like drawing a line or a circle on the screen...ugh!
Then C come along. And, uau! Instead of loosing time to code how to draw circles, I could use the prebuilt graphical routines and use my time to really design the screen. It was clear value added that freed my time to do what was valuable and not to loose time on low level stuff.
Enterprise Cloud can do the same for you now. By removing all the fuzz of installation and networking one can really focus on adding value.
New possibilities arise
But, there's more. The virtual world is far more rich than the physical. On SecondLife one can travel almost instantly, can fly and change appearance. Thinks one cannot do in real life.
In the cloud virtual environment the same happens. It is possible to create IT architectures that are not feasible in the real world.
For instance, imagine you can power up and down machines based on software rules, e.g. the amount of traffic. The more traffic goes in, the more web servers are powered on. As traffic decreases, the web servers are powered off. And, controlling this with simple configuration rules (more on this
here).
And this is just a scratch in the surface. I bet in a couple of years, many IT architectures will never be possible to do it in the old way.
So, is cloud just a hype?