The Cloud is an Architecture – Not a Thing
Posted by Margaret Dawson on April 6, 2010
Leave it to a brilliant woman in Seattle to write a great article on defining the cloud. Lori MacVittie with F5 Networks writes in Syscon’s Virtualization Journal this morning about “cloudness”. I particularly loved the paragraph where she reiterated something we are always saying – that the cloud is not a “thing” but rather a delivery or consumption model that brings all sorts of economic, business and technical benefits with it. She writes:
“…..because “cloud computing” isn’t a “thing”, it’s an architecture; it’s an operational model, a deployment model, even a financial model, but it’s not a tangible “thing” with a specific “secret ingredient” that makes it work.. . . . So like Google and Microsoft and Salesforce and a host of other cloud computing providers across the “aaS” spectrum, they all have the same ingredients – they’ve just architected them in different ways to make what we call “cloud computing.” Their secret is ultimately in the operational integration of servers, storage, network, and compute resources smothered in a secret sauce called “orchestration” that gives it cloudness: a dynamic infrastructure.
I realize I’ve been obsessing with this a bit lately, much to the chagrin of some of my analyst buds, but it’s clear that many business and IT folks out there are still trying to figure this out. In fact, when I spoke to Gartner’s Ben Pring yesterday (great analyst btw), he mentioned that “cloud” is the number one term used in inquiries.
As vendors, however, we need to remember to start first with solving the customer’s need — the fact we do it via the cloud is frosting on the cake.
Tags: Cloud Computing, F5 Networks, Lori MacVittie, SaaS
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