Cloud Computing, Is it coming of age?

In the early 1990's, when I was working for a large financial organization, large hardware vendors came along to present the then fairly revolutionary idea of “Utility Computing.” The sales guys told of a brave new world where you just paid for the servers you needed at the time you needed them, “Just like electricity.” As we had thousands of Unix servers, this all sounded pretty great to us. Of course, the sales talk was well ahead of the technology and we just continued to increase our server footprint.

Now, coming up to 20 years later, I really think we are beginning to see a viable way forward with this trend. Today, the hype is all around “Cloud Computing.” To a large extent, it seems to have been created by Amazon with their EC2 offering. Driven by the open source visualization technology, EC2 really does let you create a new virtual server either programmaticaly or through one of a number of GUI interfaces. Whats more, the server you get is charged for by the hour. I am not sure we are at a price point where this is economical for most businesses but at least the option exists now. Pricing is a little more complicated than just hiring a server for an hour as you need to pay for storage and network bandwidth as well but have a look at their latest pricing here and see if it works for you.

Now, what has really got me excited is the release of technology to build hybrid clouds. That is, private clouds within your organization that could fairly easily be expanded to include servers from a public cloud such as EC2. The Eucalytptus project provides just this functionality. This is all possible because Eucalyptus is compatible at a web services level with EC2. You can build a private cloud that is controlled by the same software as the largest public cloud. This should help getting the best of both worlds where you can trade off the cost of running your own servers against the cost of hiring them by the hour. Maybe it truly will become a brave new, cloud driven, utility computing world.

Favorite Books of IT Professionals

Being both a science fiction fan and a long time IT guy, I've always loved books that manage to capture something about our profession. Granted, I've gotten ideas from many of the people I've worked with, but the following is really a list of my favourite books with where computer technology plays some central part in the story. In no particular order:

- Neuromancer by William Gibson

- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and Jennifer Wiltsie

- Halting State by Charles Stross

- The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

- Daemon by Daniel Suarez